Maggs Bros.

Signed by the author in black ink to the title page.

A critical work by the British economist and civil servant Sir Ralph George Hawtrey (1879–1975) based on a series of lectures delivered to the Institute of Bankers in November and December, 1926. Hawtrey, an advisor at the 1922 Genoa International Financial Conference, was in favour of a return to the Gold Standard in the aftermath of the First World War, and continued to argue for its value throughout his career. ‘Given the UK’s status as a financial centre he argued that exchange instability was particularly damaging and would make the covering of trade finance offered through London increasingly difficult. This predisposed him towards the Gold Standard as the de facto most practical means of achieving exchange stability’ (New Palgrave). Recent scholarship has noted that, during the 1920s, Hawtrey, Keynes and Robertson were often ‘working along similar lines’ and ‘their work reflects (to varying degrees) an increasing failure of conventional theory to match the problems of the age’ (New Palgrave).

‘Throughout his long career, Hawtrey stood consistently for the view that business cycles are essentially a monetary phenomenon, which must therefore be controlled by regulating credit to wholesalers and retailers via the Bank Rates (or rediscount rates and not by regulating public expenditure’ (Blaug). Hawtrey was close friend of John Maynard Keynes and has the distinction of being one of the few authors to whom Keynes acknowledged an intellectual debt in the Preface to his General Theory.