ABSTRACT
As a member of the official National Debt Enquiry established in early 1945 to consider post-war monetary and debt management policy, including the possibility of a capital levy, Meade wrote the Economic Section’s memoranda for the committee on ‘The Fiscal Problem set by the Debt’, ‘The Capital Levy’ and ‘Debt Management and Employment Policy’. Since Meade began drafting them as a single paper on ‘the postwar treatment of the national debt’ they are printed together here. Meade’s memorandum on the capital levy, after some revision by other members of the Enquiry, became the committee’s report on the subject to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in June 1945. (The National Debt Enquiry included Keynes, Treasury and Inland Revenue officials, Meade and Lionel Robbins whom Meade succeeded as Director of the Economic Section at the end of 1945.) (Public Record Office T230/95, N D E Papers 4, 5 and 6, and Meade Papers 3/10; Public Record Office T230/94 and T233/159; Meade Diary, 28 January and 26 February 1945).
