Harrod and Haberler Beyond The Trade Cycle: Exchanges on International Liquidity, Gold, Trade, Inflation, Monetarism and Friedman, 1961–1971

In his paper ‘Roy Harrod on the price of gold’ that appeared in the Harrod Festschrift, Harry Johnson (1970, p. 260) referred to Harrod’s ‘unique powers of intuitive insight into complex problems of political economy in the broad sense … and the relevance of his arguments … and his contributions to our understanding of the issues involved’ in the international monetary situation between 1953 and 1970. As early as 1953, in his report for the IMF on the problem of the ‘imbalance of international payments’, and up to the 1970s, Harrod had implicitly advocated a rise in the dollar price of gold in order to ‘correct existing imbalances’; a view which at the time was ‘unpopular’, but one which was later justified and shown to be intuitively correct (Harrod, 1953; Johnson, 1970, pp. 266, 276–278).