Economic Developments in the 1920s through the Perspective of John Maynard Keynes

Abstract

I have decided to write my thesis on the economic events and developments during the 1920s, from the perspective of economist John Maynard Keynes. The structure of my thesis follows a letter exchange between Keynes and the economist Charles Jesse Bullock of Harvard from 1921 to 1928, when there were a variety of changes and developments that took place in both Great Britain and the United States. Some of the concepts that will be explored include inflation, and the way it can be perceived by different economists, bonds, exchange rates, deflation, gold standard and gold parity, as well as the types of changes that could and did take place in the economies in the US and in most European nations. Throughout the thesis there will be other professors and economists whose works will be analyzed for the purpose of gaining a deeper understanding of the subject.

The letters will be used as a flow to the thesis and as a way to track the timeline of events and the way economics developed between 1920 and 1930. I am planning to partially explore the measures developed and used by Harvard during that time period. Moreover, I will research the way those explorations, along with the economic and political events concerning both Great Britain and the Federal Reserve of the United States based on a variety of scholarly resources as well as based on the views and commentary of Keynes as portrayed in hie letters to Bullock. I would like to incorporate a large variety of sources of information in order to ascertain the accuracy of my thesis, from scholarly articles between the 1920s and today, to books by John Maynard Keynes as well as other acclaimed authors such as Walter Friedman.