Benjamin Graham on Buffer Stocks

John E Woods

No qdv3n, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Surprisingly, Benjamin Graham, the acknowledged “Father of Value Investing”, considered his most important work to be the invention of the Commodity Reserve Currency Plan during the 1930s and 1940s. Previous studies of the Plan have overlooked the fact that, of its three main components (buffer stocks, price stability and currency–backing), Graham regarded the first as the most important and the other two as “secondary” or “subsidiary”. By focusing on the buffer–stock aspect, we demonstrate, first, the breadth and depth of Graham’s overall conception in terms of both micro– and macro-economics and, second, the considerable overlap with Keynes’s ideas developed around the same time, which are manifested particularly in their common conclusion that the inefficiency of commodity markets could be rectified only by government intervention. We also comment on Mehrling’s assessment of Graham as “not any kind of economist at all” (JHET, 2011).

Date: 2021-08-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-his, nep-hpe and nep-isf
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/612545a62dab24031825bf76/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:qdv3n

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/qdv3n

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF (contact@cos.io).