This chapter argues that international monetary stability is an underprovided global public good under the current design of the International Monetary System. It proposes to apply the emerging doctrine of Common Concern of Humankind (Common Concern) as a methodological approach. This chapter starts by exploring the concept of monetary stability at the different levels of governance. It is followed by a description of the doctrine of Common Concern. It continues with an analysis of the three-dimensional approach proposed by this doctrine starting with the duty to cooperate in monetary affairs both from a top-down approach (international level of governance) and a bottom-up approach (central banking cooperation). The chapter continues by examining domestic obligations concerning monetary stability with an emphasis on the special role of the central banks and also by examining some cases of unilateral actions and issues of extraterritoriality in the pursuit of monetary stability. Lastly, it offers some remarks on the most controversial aspect of the doctrine that relates to securing compliance with the obligations that may emerge from an accepted Common Concern of international monetary stability.

This introduction sets the stage, describing the evolution of the international monetary system during the 1930s and the tenets of the Tripartite Agreement, as well as providing a literature review.

This chapter focuses on the reciprocal gold facilities created in the weeks after the Tripartite Agreement to enable exchange intervention, viewed as essential for the Agreement to have any chance of success. Each country agreed to convert its currency into gold for other members at a price set each day. The system squared the circle of how to enable countries to intervene in currencies that were not universally convertible into gold and played a crucial role in keeping members on the same page during a time of immense political and economic strain. It established a technical foundation for broader collaboration and was integral to the Tripartite Agreement's success in preventing policymakers from relapsing into the antagonisms of earlier years.

After 1985, the UK first assigned a ‘greater importance‘ to exchange rate objectives, without specifying any rule; then followed between early 1987 and March 1988, an unannounced policy of linking the pound to the deutschemark at the rate of 3 DM/£ was pursued. That policy, undertaken without the knowledge of the Prime Minister, eventually led to a sharp political conflict between Thatcher and Lawson. Subsequently, the exchange target was abandoned. All three phases of the new exchange rate regime were conceptually incoherent, and the lack of monetary control in the second half of the 1980s eventually produced not only rapid growth (that looked like a policy success and was termed the ‘Lawson boom‘) but also a new upsurge of inflation that increasingly concerned the Bank. Eddie George emerged not only as a key architect of Bank strategy but also as a favoured interlocutor of Margaret Thatcher. A background to the policy debates was the increased attraction, to the Treasury and to some figures in the Bank, of the European Monetary System as a way of securing the deutschemark as an anchor, and international coordination on exchange rates became more central to monetary policy management; Thatcher and George were critical of that vision.