ABSTRACT
The interest of the public both in the United States and abroad in America's monetary experimentation was centred in the Administration's gold purchase plan, a plan that was suddenly and without previous public discussion announced to the world by President Roosevelt in a radio address on October 22. A possible method by which the gold purchases might under certain circumstances tend to raise commodity prices is through increasing the country's gold reserves and thereby providing a basis for further bank-note and deposit-currency expansion. The only important way in which such gold purchases tended to push up commodity prices, aside from increasing the velocities of circulation by weakening the public's confidence in its currency and encouraging a flight from the dollar, was through serving as a device for banknote and deposit-currency expansion.
