ISAS Insights

Among economic historians, it is conventional to view the collapse of the Bretton Woods arrangement in the early 1970s as marking a transition from a post World War II Golden Age (of low real interest rates, low levels of sovereign indebtedness, little speculative trading in global financial markets and a high degree of financial stability) to a Leaden Age (characterized by slow growth, high unemployment, severe business cycles and a growing incidence of financial crises). Without necessarily attaching to it any of the pejorative connotations intended by the originator of the term (Mrs. Robinson (1956), and her followers such as Foley (1986) and Pollin (1998)), nor claiming for the term a universal applicability across all countries, Leaden Age could still serve as a succinct and convenient phrase to capture the generally heightened uncertainty surrounding national policy making in the post Bretton Woods scenario.