Chapter 9. Pegs, Rates and Regimes Abandoned

9.1Leaving a rule

Four of the cases read in this study are departures from a rule of money, and each takes place on a dated day. On 21 September 1931 the United Kingdom's obligation to sell gold at a fixed price was suspended. On 15 August 1971 the convertibility of the dollar into gold was suspended, announced at the same time as controls on wages and prices. On 6 October 1979 the Federal Reserve changed how it operated, moving from holding the federal funds rate in a narrow range to managing the volume of bank reserves. On 16 September 1992 sterling's participation in the exchange rate mechanism was suspended, and a direct inflation target was set on 8 October 1992. These are the records read here: Skeptron's reading of Britain Leaves Gold, The Closing of the Gold Window, Volcker's Saturday and Sterling Leaves the ERM.

A departure from a rule of money is unlike a loan, a closure or a relief of debts. The rule was there before; the departure states that it no longer binds in the same way; and the record of the departure owes a reader three things at least — the old rule, the new one, and the date of each. Two dates are not one event. Skeptron's records keep them apart where they can: the closing of the gold window in 1971 is dated to the announcement of 15 August, with the policy deliberations of 13 to 15 August held separately; the pound's exit from the exchange rate mechanism is dated to 16 September 1992, with the direct inflation target dated to 8 October.

Read case by case, the four records give the following:

Where the table shows "unsettled", the two readings of one model did not choose the same value; the other values are settled readings of the record's own words, and Chapter 2 sets out how those readings were made. Read without interpretation, the table shows what follows. All four records show an act. Two of the four name two different dated moments, one of the gold suspensions and one of the modern case; the other two do not. None of the four names an observable condition on which the departure would end or be revised, and none names who bore the cost while it ran. The study's hypothesis on conditions of return reads only from the case's own text, so where a record names none, that is what the table shows.

Two further points on method. Each record's fourth question checks a weekday by calendar arithmetic; it says nothing about the act and is not read as evidence here. And the frame — the sentences that recur across Skeptron's history cases on keeping event and document apart, on not merging announcement and result — is Skeptron's own method, set out in Chapter 2; nothing in this chapter counts it as a finding.

9.2Gold in 1931 and 1971 compared

Two of the four cases read in this chapter are suspensions of gold convertibility, forty years apart. In both an actor's own text survives, holding a condition of return or a temporary character that the passages of the record read here do not restate. In 1931 the condition on which the suspension would end is written into the Act itself — a proclamation of the King; in 1971 the address calls the suspension temporary and dates only its companion measures. Chapter 3 sets out the two texts in full; this section compares what each record holds beside what each text says.

Scene, 21 September 1931. The scene below is synthetic, written from the Act's own words and the record's scenario, and adds no event, person, sum or outcome beyond them. The Act is enacted by the King, with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and of the Commons assembled in Parliament; it discharges the Bank of England from all liability for anything it did against the gold obligation after 18 September 1931; and it empowers the Treasury to make, and vary from time to time, orders on the exchanges and otherwise, for a stated six months. What is awaited in that room is a proclamation that would direct otherwise — a document the record does not hold.

The Act's own words. The Act's long title says that it suspends the operation of subsection (2) of section one of the Gold Standard Act, 1925, and for purposes connected therewith, and it carries the date 21 September 1931. The order of the text is the suspension with its condition, the discharge of liability, the six-month administrative power, and the short title.

The record for 21 September 1931. The record gives its own dating plainly:

On what may be judged afterwards, it refuses the single-cause reading:

The record names an institution as the actor but no person or office; it gives no term for the departure, no way of undoing it, no statement of who bore the cost while the suspension ran, and no condition for revisiting the judgment. The source it checked is a Bank of England working paper on United Kingdom monetary regimes. The record thus holds the date and the background behind it, not the condition of return that the Act itself names.

Scene, 15 August 1971. The scene below is synthetic on the same terms. The President addresses the Nation on radio and television on a Sunday evening, names three targets — unemployment, inflation and international speculation — and sets out a package: a wage and price freeze described as temporary, tax and other measures, and the suspension of the dollar's convertibility. He directs the Secretary of the Treasury, named in the address as Secretary Connally, to suspend convertibility "temporarily", and imposes an additional tax of 10 per cent on imports as "a temporary measure". What is awaited there is the end of the unfair treatment the address describes — the condition the address itself gives for the end of that tax — and press for a new international monetary system with the International Monetary Fund.

The address's own words. The address opens with the war and the turn to peace, and states its targets: the creation of more and better jobs, the stopping of the rise in the cost of living, and the protection of the dollar from the attacks of international money speculators. On the wage-price freeze, the address says that it will emphasise two characteristics of the action, that the freeze is temporary, and that putting the strong, vigorous American economy into a permanent straightjacket would lock in unfairness and stifle the expansion of the free enterprise system. On the suspension: "I have directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interests of the United States." On the surcharge: "As a temporary measure, I am today imposing an additional tax of 10 percent on goods imported into the United States", and it ties the end of that surcharge to the end of the unfair treatment it was meant to correct. It also names international money speculators as those it says gain from monetary crises, and not the workingman, the investor or the real producers of wealth, while stating that its primary concern is with American workers. The order of the address is war and peace, three targets, the freeze with its temporary character, the suspension with its exception clause, the import tax with its end condition.

The record for 15 August 1971. The record names the actor in its title and holds the announcement's companions apart from what was decided elsewhere:

The record names an institution as the actor; it gives no term for the suspension, no way of undoing it, no statement of who bore the cost while it ran, and no condition for revisiting the judgment. Its source is the Federal Reserve History account of the end of gold convertibility. Its two dated moments are the deliberations of 13 to 15 August and the announcement of 15 August, which the record holds apart; the third dated moment, the day the suspension took effect, is not given. Of the two records read here, only this one names two different dated moments; the 1931 record names none.

Across the forty-two cases that show an act, one lets a later reader judge the act by its own end, taken as presented as temporary, an observable condition of ending named, who bore the cost named, and two dated moments named; neither record read here is that case.

Put beside Eichengreen's account of regimes, the two records hold less than the debate. Both record a dated act; both name no condition of return a reader could observe; both name no bearer of the cost; and neither states what became of the departure. The account is about regimes shaped by the politics of their day; the records date a single day each and refuse to prove effects from the date alone. Where the texts and the records do meet is on the written form of a suspension: the Act of 1931 puts the condition of return — a proclamation directing otherwise — in the actor's own words, while the address of 1971 gives the suspension the word "temporarily" and an exception clause, and gives a stated end condition only to the companion tax. Section 9.5 reads the argument over rules and discretion in full; what these two texts add to it is that a written condition of return can exist in the actor's document while being absent from the record the modern archive keeps of the act.

This study reads the pair as evidence about wording and dates: what each text promised, when, and what it left unnamed — not whether the promise was believed, and not what followed.

9.3Volcker's Saturday

The third case is different in kind. On 6 October 1979 the Federal Reserve announced a change in operating procedure rather than a suspension of an obligation. The actor's own text survives for this case, and it is put first; Skeptron's record follows it.

A synthetic scene: it is a Saturday, and the Board Room of the Federal Reserve Building in Washington is full on a day the reporters did not expect to be called. Mr Coyne opens by apologising for bringing them out on a beautiful day, and Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Board of Governors, takes the podium beside Stephen Axilrod, Staff Director for Monetary and Financial Policy, and Peter Sternlight, senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and manager of the System Open Market Account for domestic operations. A release lies in front of the press, listing the actions the Board and the Federal Open Market Committee have taken during the day. The reporters wait on one question above the others: what has changed in the last fortnight to move the discount rate by a full point, and how much wider may the daily rate now swing.

The transcript of the press conference is an uncorrected transcription, so what follows gives its sense and does not quote it. Volcker opens by saying that markets have been unsettled in recent days, and jokes that the major purpose of the conference is to show that he has not resigned, as an early rumour had it, and is still alive, contrary to the latest rumour. Inflation has been moving at an excessive rate, he says, and inflation and its anticipations have unsettled markets at home and abroad. The broad thrust of the actions is to bring monetary expansion and credit expansion within the ranges the Federal Reserve established a year ago, ranges reconfirmed and reported through regular procedures to the relevant Congressional committees; money supply and bank credit, he notes, have been running above those ranges. Asked to explain the third item of the package, he describes the change itself: for some years the Federal Reserve had put much of its day-to-day emphasis on maintaining a high degree of stability in the federal funds rate, moving it in one direction by small increments in order to affect money growth; the new approach puts the primary emphasis on the supply of reserves, which ultimately controls the money supply. The control, he cautions, is not so precise that it works week by week, or even with precision month by month; but firmer control of money growth over a shorter period should follow. Supplying reserves in that manner means the daily rate in the market is apt to fluctuate over a wider range than has been the practice in recent years, and the Federal Reserve will take less interest in the daily fluctuations of that very short-term rate. On the marginal reserve requirement he says that it is not the ordinary kind of measure one would keep in place permanently; it is designed to fit a particular situation, and he is sure that both the Board and the banks will be happy to get rid of it as the situation warrants. Asked whether the funds rate will now be left hands-off, he answers that the banks will have to learn again how to make reserve adjustments in a market that does not have the same official chaperonage, that there will be substantial freedom in the market, that he will not forecast a range of fluctuation, and that the Federal Reserve will not shepherd the market so closely from day to day.

Eleven days later, Volcker's statement before the Joint Economic Committee, likewise given here in sense, explains the actions to Congress. He notes that he appears in his still-new capacity, that no choice before the Federal Reserve is risk-free or pain-free, and that inflation and inflationary expectations have disturbed financial and commodity markets and the value of the dollar internationally. Of the package announced on 6 October he says that it was part of a continuing effort to maintain control over money and credit expansion, that the basic targets were not changed, and that the new measures, involving among other things a change in operating procedures, should provide added assurance that those objectives will be reached. More emphasis, he adds, will be placed on controlling the provision of reserves to the banking system; the discount rate has been raised so that restraint on bank reserves is not offset by excessive borrowing; a special marginal reserve requirement of 8 per cent has been placed on increases in managed liabilities of larger banks; and the new technique for conducting open market operations is not a panacea, since the definition of money itself needs refinement. The Federal Reserve will adapt its instruments to shifting needs as time passes, and will monitor financial markets and the flow of credit closely.

Skeptron's record of the same day is a short reading of what was done, written in 2026 from a public source, and its Scenario states the change and its warning in three sentences.

The federal funds rate is the rate at which banks lend reserves to one another overnight. Holding it in a narrow range meant that the central bank's day-to-day operations absorbed whatever the banking system demanded, and that the rate itself moved little. Managing the volume of bank reserves instead means that the central bank supplies a chosen amount of reserves and lets the price of them move. The record's second sentence describes that change in plain terms; its third records the consequence the announcement itself stated — that interest rates might now swing more widely.

Read in plain words, what the record leaves out is as visible as what it holds. The record does not call the change temporary, names no condition on which it would end or be revised, says nothing about what became of the act, gives no sum, limit or rate for it, names no two dated moments among the announcement and its effect, and names no person or institution bearing a cost while it ran. The record's boundary answer marks what may not be inferred from a later vantage.

David E. Lindsey, Athanasios Orphanides and Robert H. Rasche, in "The Reform of October 1979: How It Happened and Why" (2005), give a documentary account of the decision: the background of rising inflation, the debates within the Federal Open Market Committee, the role of Paul Volcker, and the reasons for the change, arguing that the move was a way to permit larger swings in interest rates and to signal commitment against inflation. William L. Silber, in Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence (2012), a biography written for a general audience, covers Volcker's career at the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Federal Reserve Board, including the role in the end of the dollar's gold convertibility in 1971, the leadership of the Federal Reserve in the fight against inflation, the policy change of October 1979 and the tight money that followed, arguing that persistence in the face of political and economic pressure was central to the outcome. Both accounts are about intentions and consequences; neither is in Skeptron's record, and the record holds no forecast and no target against which they could be tested.

Two series outside the records set the scene and are evidence for nothing here. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis series FEDFUNDS, the effective federal funds rate, monthly, gives 11.43 per cent in September 1979, 13.77 in October, 13.78 in December, 17.19 in March 1980, 17.61 in April, 10.98 in May, 18.90 in December 1980 and 19.10 in June 1981 — a record of movement, not of any act, and not a measure of what the announcement of 6 October achieved. The same office's series CPIAUCSL, the consumer price index for all urban consumers, gives yearly averages of 72.583 for 1979 and 90.933 for 1981 on a 1982–1984 basis. These figures come from outside the study's records; they name the field in which the record's act was taken and nothing more.

This study reads the record as holding an operating procedure presented without a term. A procedure tells a later reader how a rule was administered; it is not itself a promise to hold a rate, and it is not a suspension. The record does not say when the procedure would end, does not name the condition on which it would be revised or returned to the earlier method, and does not say who bore the cost while the wider swings ran. The actor's own texts make the same shape plain: the press conference names a possibility of wider daily movement and declines to forecast a range; the statement to Congress names no end date, no condition and no instrument to be retired on a stated day, saying only that instruments will be adapted as time passes. The one forward-looking sentence in the record, the warning that rate fluctuations could widen, names a possibility and no end. An act with a date, a stated change, and no stated end.

9.4Sterling's sixteenth of September

The fourth case in this chapter holds two dated acts and very little else of a decision: an obligation abandoned on a day in September, and a new standard of policy set three weeks later. The record dates both, names no person or office as the decider, states no sum, no band and no target value, and gives no observation that would make either act be changed. What this section adds to the argument taken up in 9.5 is narrow and firm: the case usually told as the end of a rule shows, in its own archive's record, only the end of one obligation and the beginning of another — both dated, neither conditioned. That is a claim about what a record holds, and not a judgment on the merits or the effects of Britain's policy in 1992.

The record states both dates in a single sentence, and keeps them in order.

Read in that order, three things stand out. First, the record gives a date for the ending of one rule — 16 September 1992 — and a date for the beginning of another — 8 October 1992 — and separates them rather than running them together as a single event. Second, it separates them by kind, not only by date: the exchange-rate defence regime is one thing, the new policy standard another. Third, the sentence records the separation itself as a fact about the case, which is what a later reader needs if two dated acts are to be read as two acts and not as one story with two moments.

The exchange rate mechanism was the arrangement by which the pound and other European currencies were held within bands against one another, with the central banks of the participating countries obliged to buy and sell at the edges of those bands. Suspending participation removed that obligation: the Bank of England was no longer bound to defend a parity against the mark or the dollar. Setting an inflation target directly replaced one standard of policy with another — a stated figure for consumer price inflation, to be pursued by interest rates rather than by the exchange rate. The record keeps the two apart and gives the target date as 8 October in its Answer; the Scenario of the same record writes that date in the form 10-08. Both forms are given here as the record gives them, and the Answer is the record's own clarification of which is meant.

No public text from September or October 1992 survives among the materials this chapter receives. The record's own source is a Bank of England working paper on United Kingdom monetary regimes — the same source the record for 1931 checked. Two records of different acts resting on one working paper is a fact about these two records and no more; it is not evidence that either act followed from the paper, and this study does not read it as such. The record names no actor as the decider of the suspension; its words describe the stoppage of participation and the setting of a target without naming a person or an office. Because no British government statement of that month is among the texts used here, no actor's own words can be put first in this section, and nothing is quoted from them.

What the record refuses to say about traders is stated in its own boundary answer.

The refusal is specific and it is a refusal of method rather than of interest. A trader's gain cannot be computed from the exit date alone; the record would need positions, execution prices and costs, and it will not fill them in with what it does not have. Nor will it substitute a well-known person's account of the day for trading records. The practical consequence runs further than traders: with no band, no target value and no rate stated anywhere in the record, a later reader has nothing to hang any figure on — the record's figure reading is that none appears. A famous anecdote about 16 September is exactly the kind of story that a reader of a case like this is most likely to supply from memory, and the record's boundary answer closes that door before it opens.

One series from outside the records sets the scene. FRED series EXUSUK, the United States dollar to United Kingdom pound spot exchange rate, monthly, gives 1.9434 dollars to the pound in August 1992, 1.8465 in September, 1.6529 in October, 1.5268 in November and 1.5510 in December. FRED series TB3MS, the three-month Treasury bill secondary market rate on a discount basis, gives a yearly average of 3.43 per cent for 1992 and 3.00 for 1993. These are market observations drawn from outside the study's records; they do not show what any authority did on any of those days, and they are not evidence for or against any hypothesis the study tests.

Two counts from the ledger, in plain words. Across all eighty-four records, only eighteen give two different dated moments among an act's decision, its taking effect and the settlement of its result; most name none. In this case the cost-bearing and the dated moments fail differently: no one is named as bearing the cost while the peg stood, and the two dates that are named belong to two acts of different kinds rather than to one act's decision and its result.

On the study's axes the case reads as follows. An act is present, of the kind a change of rate, peg or monetary regime. The record does not call it temporary. It names no condition, date or event on which the abandonment would be reversed or the new target revised — the record sets out what replaced the old standard and names nothing that would end or revisit it. What became of either act is not stated in the record. Two dated moments are named, and both are acts rather than results, three weeks apart. Who bore the cost while the exchange-rate defence stood, or after it stopped, is not named; the boundary answer shows why a later reader cannot go looking for one without trading data, and this study will not invent any.

This study reads the pair as a departure whose record names the end of one rule and the introduction of another, while naming no condition for revisiting either. The absence is not of dates but of a return or a revision trigger: nothing in the record says what observation would make the inflation target, or the absence of a peg, be changed.

9.5The debate over rules and discretion

The four cases sit inside a long argument about whether a rule of money binds better than a policy maker's judgment at the moment of crisis. The argument is made in the works of Kydland and Prescott and of Bordo and Kydland. The records can be read for what an act's own words promised, when, and on what stated condition it would end; they cannot be read for what a commitment did to behaviour, because none of them holds a forecast, a target or a statement of belief. These records ask whether the rule's own record says when the rule stops binding.

Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott, "Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans" (1977), holds no history and no records: it states the problem a record could in principle test — whether an announced plan was followed once the moment came — and then does not test it.

The escape clause Bordo and Kydland describe has two parts — a suspension taken in an emergency, and a public expectation of a return to the old parity — and the distinction matters here.

In the Gold Standard (Amendment) Act, 1931, the condition of return is a proclamation by the King: a named decision event, not a date, not a threshold, not a number. Nixon's address of 15 August 1971 writes the suspension with the word "temporarily" and with an exception clause, and neither the word nor the clause carries a date or a return condition. The companion measure in the same address does carry one: "As a temporary measure, I am today imposing an additional tax of 10 percent on goods imported into the United States." (Richard Nixon, address of 15 August 1971.) The address ties that tax's end to an event — when the unfair treatment it was meant to correct ended, the tax would end with it. The condition attaches to the surcharge, not to convertibility.

Skeptron's records for those two days hold neither text's wording. The record for 15 August 1971 keeps the deliberations and the announcement apart, and names the companion of the announcement.

The record for 21 September 1931 states the constraint that changed and refuses to read effects from the date. Neither record names a condition on which the suspension would end, and neither names who bore the cost while it ran.

The credibility reading of 1979 belongs to the same argument. David E. Lindsey, Athanasios Orphanides and Robert H. Rasche, in "The Reform of October 1979: How It Happened and Why" (2005), give a documentary account of the decision: the background of rising inflation, the debates within the Federal Open Market Committee, the role of Paul Volcker, and the reasons for the change, arguing that the move was a way to permit larger swings in interest rates and to signal commitment against inflation. William L. Silber, in Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence (2012), a biography for a general audience, covers Volcker's career at the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Federal Reserve Board, including the policy change of October 1979 and the tight money that followed, arguing that persistence in the face of political and economic pressure was central to the outcome. Both accounts are about intentions and consequences. Neither is in Skeptron's record, and the record holds no forecast and no target against which they could be tested.

At the press conference of Saturday 6 October 1979, Volcker explained that for some years the Federal Reserve had put much of its day-to-day emphasis on keeping the federal funds rate stable, and that the new approach puts the primary emphasis on the supply of reserves, which ultimately controls the money supply; he said the control is not precise week by week or even month by month, that it should give firmer control over a shorter period, and that the other side of the coin is that the daily market rate is apt to fluctuate more widely. On the marginal reserve requirement he said it was not the ordinary kind of measure one would like to keep in place permanently, that it was designed to fit a particular situation, and that the authorities and the banks would be glad to get rid of it as the situation warranted. His statement to the Joint Economic Committee of 17 October 1979, eleven days later, is the decision maker's account after the fact: the actions announced on 6 October were part of a continuing effort, the basic targets were not changed, the new measures should provide added assurance that those objectives would be reached, and above all should make clear an unwillingness to finance a continuing inflationary process; he also said the new technique for conducting open market operations was not a panacea and that the instruments would be adapted as time passes. The record for that day states the change and its warning in three sentences.

Where the four cases bear on this debate, they bear narrowly. Two of them, 1931 and 1971, have the shape Bordo and Kydland describe: a suspension of convertibility in an emergency, in a country that could return at the old parity in principle. The other two, 1979 and 1992, are changes of standard rather than suspensions: the first replaces one operating method with another, the second replaces an exchange-rate defence with an inflation target. The record for the fourth case names both dated moments and holds them as two acts of different kinds.

The records are dated acts. They show what was done, when, and in what words.

The gap is total and worth stating plainly. No record here holds a forecast or a target missed. None holds an expectation, a promise of return or a statement of what private agents believed. The record for 1931 refuses the single-cause reading directly.

The credibility debate turns on what a commitment did to behaviour over time; these records contain no measurement of behaviour and no account of what became of the acts. Two dated moments appear in two of the four cases, and both are acts, not results.

This study reads the four records as evidence about wording and dates only. The escape clause in Bordo and Kydland's reading has two parts — a suspension, and a public expectation of a return to the old parity. The records hold the first part in two cases and hold nothing of the second; the 1931 Act's own words supply a condition in the form of a proclamation while the case's record supplies none, and this study does not treat that gap as an argument about credibility either way. A record of a departure can show what an authority wrote; it cannot show what a public expected, and this study does not treat the silence as if it did. Likewise, the reading that rules bind better than discretion asks what a policy maker will do when the future arrives; these records date what was done, and none of them states a plan from which a later action could be measured as a departure. Volcker's statement to Congress is itself an account given after the fact by a decision maker — an account of what the actions were meant to do, which is a statement of aim rather than a record of what was believed or what followed.

9.6New rules after old ones

Each of the four departures left something in place of the rule it removed, and the study asks of each replacement what the record's own words say it was, and whether the replacement named its own end.

For 1931 the record is thin on the new rule. Its title speaks of "changes to the pound's institutional framework", and its Answer says only that the monetary constraint of maintaining gold convertibility "has changed". The record does not state in words what the new rule was, who set it, or on what terms. The source text gives the shape of the old rule's suspension and nothing about a successor regime; what followed on the record's own dates is not stated in the record.

For 1971 the record does not name a replacement rule for convertibility. The reading note on Nixon's address records that the announcement ended the convertibility that had been the base of the Bretton Woods system, though the address described the suspension as temporary; that is the note's account, not the record's. Gowa's note records only that the Nixon administration's priorities, including the aim of lower unemployment and the electoral calendar, and the pressures on the balance of payments, led to the suspension and not external events alone.

For 1979 the record states the replacement directly: the focus moved to managing the scale of bank reserves. The new rule is the operating method itself, and the record names nothing that would end it.

For 1992 the record names the replacement with a date: a direct inflation target dated 8 October, distinguished from the exchange-rate defence regime. It names no condition on which the target, or the absence of a peg, would be revised.

Whether a replacement named its own end is answered the same way in all four cases: the condition of ending is not-named in each, and what became of the act is not-said in each. Whether the act is presented as temporary is unsettled in the two gold cases and not-said in the other two. The conditions for revisiting the judgment number zero in all four. The one end-condition in the two texts compared here belongs to a companion measure and not to the rule: Nixon's address ties the end of the ten per cent import surcharge to the end of the unfair treatment it described, while the suspension of convertibility itself carries only the word "temporarily" and an exception clause; the Act of 1931 leaves the suspension until a proclamation directs otherwise, and gives a six-month term only to the Treasury's power to make orders on the exchanges. Chapter 3 reads those texts on what each named as a condition of return; the point here is about replacements rather than returns, and it is the same shape of absence: a new rule appears, and the record of it does not say when the new rule would end.

The comparison across the two halves of this chapter is therefore limited but usable. Two records hold the end of an old rule and the introduction of a new one as separate dated acts; two hold a single dated act; none of the four holds an observable condition of the new rule's end, and none names who bore the cost while the old rule was gone and the new one had not settled. Chapter 12 reports the ledger's verdicts on the study's own hypotheses across all eighty-four cases; this chapter reports only what its four records hold.

The cases in the next chapter are of a different kind altogether. There, a market moves — prices fall, a bubble rises — and the record holds no act, no authority and no decision at all. Chapter 10 asks what the study's axes can still read in a record where there is nothing to decide, and why an act is absent from such a record rather than merely unrecorded.