MATERIALS FROM CHARLES O. HARDY’S COURSE ON MONEY AND BANKING, ECONOMICS 330, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 1933–1934

Abstract

Charles Oscar Hardy (1884–1948) was a well-known though perhaps not leading monetary and financial economist of his time. He was and is important enough, however, to be remembered and studied a half century later (see Frank G. Steindl, Monetary Interpretations of the Great Depression, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995; J. Ronnie Davis, The New Economics and the Old Economists, Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1971; and Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, 1913–1951, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Educated at Ottawa University, Kansas (AB, 1904) (a private university affiliated with the Baptist Denomination) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1916), he taught at both schools as well as at the University of Iowa. He was Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, had a long-term association with the Brookings Institution, and was a frequent advisor to government agencies. Working when the gold standard was in effect, he discerned instability as the likely consequence of excessive gold stocks and resultant credit expansion. An advocate of central-bank monetary management, he worried over limits to its power to create monetary stability because of shifts in the balance of trade and in long-term investment, and called for major reform of the gold standard. Subsequently, he advocated activist monetary and fiscal policy. Hardy also contributed to the development of the theory of risk and uncertainty, a field dominated by his colleague, Frank Knight.

Citation

(2005), "MATERIALS FROM CHARLES O. HARDY’S COURSE ON MONEY AND BANKING, ECONOMICS 330, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 1933–1934", Samuels, W.J. (Ed.) Further University of Wisconsin Materials: Further Documents of F. Taylor Ostrander (Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, Vol. 23), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 241-269. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0743-4154(05)23207-8