Kaldor himself was one of the more important spokesmen for reform in the 1960s and
1970s. In 1964, he, along with A. G. Hart and J. Tinbergen submitted a paper to the
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development that proposed a version of a plan
for a new world currency that Benjamin Graham had submitted to participants at Bretton
Woods in 1944 (Graham, 1944). Graham’s initial work in the monetary field (Graham,
1937) offered a plan for a new US domestic currency in the form of receipts issued by
a commodity storage facility. The objective of both his domestic plan and the international
version was to ensure monetary stability through countercyclical mechanisms, preserve the
link between monetary issuance and the real economy, and back currency issues with
a class of financial assets that would be less likely to divert monetary resources into
speculative activities.1
1 Graham argued that, under his storage plan, rising prices in a boom would increase redemptions of
stored commodities that would augment their supply and drive down their price while shrinking the supply of
commodity currency. In a downturn, falling prices would encourage producers to store commodities
(stabilising their price) while increasing the supply of commodity currency