Ralph George Hawtrey

Ralph George Hawtrey
Residence	Oxford, UK
Institutions	Royal Institute for International Affairs
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Notable awards	Guy Medal in Silver

Sir Ralph George Hawtrey (22 November 1879, Slough – 21 March 1975, London) was a British economist, and a close friend of John Maynard Keynes. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the University of Cambridge intellectual secret society.

He took a monetary approach towards the economic ups and downs of industry and commerce, advocating changes in the money supply through adjustment in the bank rate of interest, foreshadowing the later work of Keynes. In the 1920s, he advocated what was later called the Treasury View. He also advanced in 1931 the concept that became known as the multiplier, a coefficient showing the effect of a change in total national investment on the amount of total national income.

It was his view that the botched attempt to restore the international gold standard led to the Great Depression. He had played a key role in the Genoa Conference of 1922, which attempted to devise arrangements for a stable return to the gold standard.

Hawtrey was born in Slough, near London, and went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, from Eton in 1898. He studied at Eton, then Cambridge, where he graduated in 1901 with first-class mathematics honours. He entered the Admiralty in 1903, then he was moved to the Treasury (1904), where he became director of financial enquiries in 1919. Until his retirement in 1945 he worked in the UK Treasury.

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