Keynes’ Friend on Monetary Systems

London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1923. Original green canvas boards; vii, [1], 147 pp. First Edition. ​“Frank D. Graham” in fountain pen to fly leaf. Very good, top and bottom of spine with heavy wear, light rubbing and bumping to boards, paper yellowed. Ralph G. Hawtrey (1879–1975) was a British economist, and a close friend of John Maynard Keynes. It was his view that the botched attempt to restore the international gold standard led to the Great Depression. He had played a key role in the Genoa Conference of 1922, which attempted to devise arrangements for a stable return to the gold standard. This book sets forth his thesis on international monetary arrangements from the gold standard, to an analysis of the ​“European currency situation”, and explains the U.S. Federal Reserve system. Frank D. Graham (1890–1949), to whom this book belonged, was an American economist and Professor of economics at Princeton. In conjunction with Benjamin Graham, Frank Graham became a proponent of the adoption of a ​“commodity reserve currency” replacing the single-commodity currency backing in force in the gold standard (which he criticized endlessly) with a basket of commodities. An important book on international monetary arrangements, owned by a prominent American economist.