Keynes and the International Monetary System 1909–46

I think that there is a real, though slow-moving, tendency for national interests to overrule provincial interests, and international interests to override national, and I think the time will come at which it will be thought as unreasonable for any country to regulate its currency without reference to other countries as it would be to have signalling codes at sea which took no account of the signalling codes at sea of other countries. (Marshall’s evidence to the Royal Commission on the Values of Gold and Silver, Q. 10006, quoted by Keynes in a letter to E. M. Bernstein, 29 May 1945, Keynes, CW vol. 26, p. 195) On 30 January 1909, John Maynard Keynes, then a temporary lecturer in economics at Cambridge and not yet a Fellow of King’s, set down a list of future publications. The list contained the titles of 8 articles, 2 monographs, 2 treatises and 2 textbooks. Of the articles, 3 related to the international monetary system: ‘The Indian Gold Standard Reserve’; ‘Proposals for an International Currency’; and ‘English Gold Reserves’. Thirty-seven years later, Keynes was putting the finishing touches on his last professional article, ‘The Balance of Payments of the United States’ (CW vol. 27, pp. 427–46). The article did not appear until after his death because he did not want it published until after the 1945 American Loan to Britain had passed Congress.