ABSTRACT
In his History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter asserts that after the Bullionist Controversy there were no significant contributions to the field of monetary analysis until the interwar period. In fact, he notes that ‘the Report of the Cunliffe Committee that recommended England’s return to gold at prewar parity in 1918 (final report, 1919) displayed little, if any, knowledge of monetary problems that was not possessed by the men who drafted the Bullion Report’ (Schumpeter 1954: 661). Without endorsing such a categorical assertion, the aim of this work is to show how important, after the Great War, the influence of the debate held at the time of the Bullion Report still was. Even if there had been a shift of emphasis as compared with the times of the Bullionist Controversy, with the discussion focusing more on the mechanisms of adjustment of the balance of payments than on the causes of gold flows, the influence of the old debate was still pervasive.
