HARROD (Roy Forbes).

Reforming the World's Money.

First edition. 8vo. viii, 181, [1] pp. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust jacket (internally clean and unmarked; jacket slightly edge worn with minor chipping to tips of spine panel and corners, two closed tears to lower edge of front panel, otherwise a very good copy). London, Macmillan, 1965.

£75.00

‘Harrod’s work on the world’s international monetary problems occupied a good deal of his time and attention in the post-war decades. Keynes himself had considered the breakdown in international monetary relations a crucial element in the collapse of effective demand in so many countries in the 1930s, and he devoted much of the last years of his life to the creation of new institutions which would avoid a repetition of these disasters. Harrod believed he was continuing this vital work when he devoted much thought and energy to these questions. He arrived at the conclusion that there was bound to be some inflation in a world which was successfully pursuing Keynesian policies, and that the liquidity base of the world’s financial system was bound to become inadequate if the price of gold failed to rise with other prices. He believed that underlying world liquidity which rested on gold in the last resort must be allowed to rise in line with the international demand for money. He therefore came to focus on the price of gold, and in his book, Reforming the World‘s Money (1965), he proposed that a substantial increase in the price of gold would be needed if subsequent international monetary crises were to be avoided’ (New Palgrave).

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250610