THE MONETARY ECONOMICS OF BENJAMIN GRAHAM: A BRIDGE BETWEEN GOODS AND MONEY?

Abstract

Benjamin Graham’s amateur proposal for a commodity reserve currency (1937, 1944) has attracted the attention of professional economists and policy makers, but usually for their own prior purposes and designs. This paper places the proposal in the context of Graham’s own time and the intellectual resources available to him, with a view to elucidating both Graham’s own sense of the proposal and the reasons the proposal earned the reception it did.