The purpose of the paper is to rescue Irving Fisher’s theorizing of the yield curve (1896, 1907, 1930) from relative obscurity and to contrast it with the better known and equally pioneering theory of John Maynard Keynes (1930, 1936). The paper also adduces evidence that Fed economists and the U.S. monetary experience in the 1920s greatly influenced these authors, both of whom were concerned with the management of the long-term interest rate.

John Richard Hicks proposed an endogenous theory of money from the 1960s until his final book, A Market Theory of Money (1989). He developed a theory of credit and a theory of short-term rates of interest that had been neglected in his earlier writings such as “Mr. Keynes and the ‘Classics’” (1937). In that early article, Hicks concentrated on the market for cash balances and the motives for the demand for money, while leaving aside the money market and the clearing function of banks. In the 1960s, Hicks was largely inspired by Henry Thornton (1802) and Ralph George Hawtrey (1913, 1919). The originality of this paper is to interpret the short-term rates as the price of liquidity and to examine Hicks’s fight against restrictive monetary policies in the 1960s to the 1970s in Britain.

This paper deals with a debate among Ralph George Hawtrey, John Richard Hicks, and John Maynard Keynes concerning the capacity of the central bank to influence the short-term and the long-term rates of interest. Both Hawtrey and Keynes considered the central bank’s ability to influence short-term rates of interest. However, they do not put the same emphasis on the study of the long-term rates of interest. According to Keynes, long-term rates are influenced by future expected short-term rates (1930, 1936), whereas for Hawtrey ([1932] 1962, 1937, 1938), long-term rates are more dependent on the business cycle. Short-term rates do not have much effect on long-term rates, according to Hawtrey. In 1939, Hicks enters the controversy, giving credit to both Hawtrey’s and Keynes’s theories, and also introducing limits to the operations of arbitrage. He thus presented a nuanced view.