Feliks Młynarski was born to Jan Młynarski, a school teacher, and Honorate née Dziurzyńska. He attended a gymnasiuminJarosław, but because of his involvement in organizing meetings in favor of Polish independence, he was expelled by the Austrian authorities, and had to finish his secondary education at a school in Sanok, in 1903.
After the war he joined the newly formed government of the Second Polish Republic. In the years 1921–1923 he directed the Emigration Office. From 1923 he was employed at the Ministry of Finance, and the following year he became the director of the Currency Department of the Ministry.[1] He took part in the Grabski Monetary Reform of 1924,[1] which ended hyperinflationininterwar Poland[2] and was a co-creator of the Bank of Poland for which he served as vice-president between September 1924 and September 1924.[1] In the years 1925–1927 he helped negotiated several economic agreements between Poland and the United States.[1] He fell out of favor with the sanacja government of Józef Piłsudski and resigned from governmental positions in 1929.[1] In the 1930s he taught at the Warsaw Trade Academy, and consulted for the League of Nations on currency issues.[1]
After the war, in 1945, he became a member of the Polish Academy of ScienceinPeople's Republic of Poland.[5] Between 1945 and 1948 he taught at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. His war time collaboration with the Germans, even though approved by the Polish underground government of that time, cast a shadow on his career, and resulted in refusal to grant him a professorship position.[5][6] He also served as the director of the library of Cracow University of Economics.[6]
Młynarski authored numerous works from the fields of economy, sociology and philosophy.[1]
In his 1929 book Gold and Central Banks Młynarski identified a fundamental instability in a gold-based international monetary system: the reserve currency countries would tend to accumulate foreign reserves, but as the volume of these grew relative to the country's gold reserves, international investors would begin to fear suspension of convertibility. The resulting outflow of reserves could create significant worldwide deflationary pressures and possibly lead to the collapse of the gold-based system. After World War II, the same problem was identified by the Belgian economist Robert Triffin, but in relation to the Bretton Woods system and became known as the Triffin dilemma. Due to Młynarski's precedence in articulating the problem, Barry Eichengreen has suggested renaming the problem to "the Młynarski dilemma".[7]
^Andrzej Gojski, Etapy i cele niemieckiej polityki bankowej w GG. Plany niemieckie wobec Generalnego Gubernatorstwa w latach 1939–1945, BANK I KREDYT, August 2004, pdfArchived 5 March 2009 at the Wayback Machine
Rafał Łętocha, Nacjonalizm liberalny Feliksa Młynarskiego [w:] Nacjonalizmy różnych narodów. Perspektywa politologiczno-religioznawcza, pod red. B. Grotta i O. Grotta, Kraków 2012.
Rafał Łętocha: Spójne społeczeństwo. Proporcjonalizm i federalizm Feliksa Młynarskiego. Nowy Obywatel, 13 kwietnia 2012.
