WILLSON, Hugh Bowlby.

£1,100 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Currency, or the fundamental principles of monetary science, postulated, explained, and applied. First edition of the author's major work on monetary policy.Published posthumously with a prefatory memoir by the author's brother, Currency is a confident treatise on monetary theory, conversant with the best of contemporary economic thought, written by the Canadian-born Hugh Bowlby Willson (1813-1880), proposing a plan for monetary union between the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland and giving a monetary (as well as an anti-protectionist) explanation of the business cycle.In a closely reasoned analysis, Willson attributes depressions in large measure to bank-financed excessive growth, the creation of "capital, largely fictitious, drawn from bills discounted." Willson was "deeply involved in the postwar 'Greenback' controversy in the United States. In a number of pamphlets and in testimony before a congressional committee in 1879, he argued strongly that notes issued by the state should be the permanent and exclusive circulating medium. He suggested the creation of a currency board to control the issue of paper money and proposed that the amount of paper money should be related to the volume of business transactions in the country" (R. Warren James and John S. Moir in Dictionary of Canadian Biography).Willson was a man of wide interests: a railroad builder, ship designer, and newspaper man, founder of the Canadian Independent in 1849 (which, pac

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