| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Bruce Muirhead. Against the Odds: The Public Life and Times of Louis Rasminsky. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. 1999. Pp. x, 380. $45.00.

Central bankers do not lead lives filled with glamor and thrills. They prefer to operate quietly behind the scenes, trying to keep exchange rates stable and inflation under control, although they can face exciting times when fighting off an attack on the value of their currency by speculators. Louis Rasminsky served as governor of the Bank of Canada from 1961 to 1973, and Bruce Muirhead sticks strictly to his "public life" so that the focus of this book is sharply on administrative and policy matters. Rasminsky was a brilliant student at the University of Toronto in the 1920s, then spent a couple of years at the London School of Economics before abandoning doctoral studies to work for the League of Nations secretariat, where he remained throughout the 1930s. Returning to Canada in the 1940s, he helped manage wartime exchange controls, which led him to to join the Bank of Canada and assume an important role in the negotiations over new postwar arrangements that culminated in the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at Bretton Woods. For the next fifteen years, Rasminsky was Canada's principal representative at the IMF and earned a reputation which led some to propose that he head up the fund in 1956; instead the Americans and the British successfully backed Per Jacobsson of Sweden. . . .

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