Early neoliberals favored the gold standard and opposed floating rates

Evidence

In the beginning, the neoliberals were almost all gold bugs. At the founding MPS conference in 1947, nearly every participant agreed that the reintroduction of the classical gold standard with liberalized capital movements would be the monetary system consistent with the core values of the new society, while flexible exchange rates were regarded as Keynesian, nationalist, and unstable. Yet there was dissent even at this first conference as the renowned Princeton economist Frank Graham presented the idea of a “Commodity Reserve Standard” as a preferable alternative to the gold standard. Graham died in 1949 and could not continue the project further, but it was taken up by Milton Friedman, whose arguments for flexible exchange rates developed in the years following the foundation of the MPS bore a clear resemblance to those of Graham. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 428

Categorization

• XREF: Directly fractures the crude stereotype that neoliberalism was a unified ‘free markets’ project—the founders were gold bugs, not monetarist floaters. — connects to: The gold standard’s wage flexibility presupposed excluding democratic labor from politics — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 492; Liquidationism and the Treasury view were the original neoliberal ideas — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 271; Neoliberals pushed floating exchange rates and open capital flows that disciplined welfare spending. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 792 (+8 more)
• DEFINE: Introduces Frank Graham’s ‘Commodity Reserve Standard’ as a distinct monetary alternative within early MPS debates.

Broader Connections

• Austrian school economists converted from gold standard to floating rates #contradicts (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 431
• Gold standard currencies had fixed parities and central banks limited issuance to gold reserves #expands (0.80) — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 64