One Hundred Years Ago. Keynes’s A Tract on Monetary Reform

Abstract

Keynes’s General Theory is the basis of how we think about fiscal policy today, having displaced the Gladstonian view of what constituted sound finance. His earlier Tract on Monetary Reform, written a century ago, advocated what is now the standard form of monetary policy, varying interest rates to target domestic prices rather than a fixed exchange rate. But it was less influential at the time than was the General Theory. The Tract was also less theoretically innovative, being based on the Cambridge tradition of the quantity theory of money.