Jacques Rueff

Jacques Rueff (august 23, 1896 - april 23, 1978) was a French economist and adviser to the French Government.

An influential French conservative and free market thinker, Rueff was born the son of a well known Parisian physician and studied economics and mathematics at the École Polytechnique. An important economic advisor to French President Charles de Gaulle, Rueff was also a major figure in the management of the French economy during the Great Depression. In 1941 Rueff was dismissed from his office as the deputy governor of the Bank of France as a result of the Vichy regime's new anti-semitic laws. Rueff published several works of political economy and philosophy during his lifetime, including "L'Ordre Social" which appeared shortly after Liberation.

After the war Rueff became one of the leading French members of the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society, the president of the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency (IARA), and the minister of state of Monaco. Rueff was strongly in favour of European integration and served from 1952 to 1962 as a judge on the European High Court of Justice.

He advised General de Gaulle after de Gaulle became French President in 1958. The 1958 Rueff Plan (also known as the Rueff-Pinay Plan) balanced the budget and secured the convertibility of the franc, which had been endangered by the strains of decolonization.

In the 1960s, Rueff became a major proponent of a return to the gold standard and critical of the use of the dollar as a unit of reserve, which he warned would cause a worldwide inflation. A member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, Rueff was elected to the Académie Française in 1964. Foreseeing the emerging European Community Common Market, Rueff recommands cutting barriers to competition in his second report. Along with co-writer Louis Armand and helped by an ad-hoc committee of experts, the "plan Rueff-Armand" - as the press would call it - is published in 1960. The full title of the report is "Rapport du Comité pour la suppression des obstacles à l'expansion économique", which translates as "Report on suppressing barriers to economic growth".

Jacques Rueff has always remained a firm opponent of Lord Keynes ideas. His antagonistic viewpoints first appeared in the Economics Journal, on the issue of transfers, in relationship with German war reparations. Jacques Rueff refused such transfers in the late 30's and in 1947, against the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Currency. James Tobin becomes his main contradictor in 1958, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Almost thirty years later, he explained his beliefs once more in "The End of the Keynesian Era", first published in the authoritative French newspaper "Le Monde".