Dennis Holme Robertson

Sir Dennis Holme Robertson (23 May 1890 – 21 April 1963) was an English economist who taught at Cambridge and London Universities.

Quotes

 * Looking back the great American ‘stabilisation’ [and boom] of 1922-1929 was really a vast attempt to destabilise the value of money in terms of human effort by means of a colossal programme of investment [driven by too easy credit]... which succeeded for a surprisingly long period, but which no human ingenuity could have managed to direct indefinitely on sound and balanced lines. [and therefore it ended dramatically in the huge 1929 stock market crash followed by the Great Depression.]
 * D.H. Robertson in "How Do We Want Gold to Behave?." The International Gold Problem, Humphrey Milford (1932): As cited in imagi-natives.com; Also cited in: Murray N. Rothbard (2013) America's Great Depression (LFB) p. 1921.


 * The value of a yellow metal, originally chosen as money because it tickled the fancy of savages, is clearly a chancy and irrelevant thing on which to base the value of our money and the stability of our industrial system."
 * D.H. Robertson, quotes in: Oscar Sachse (1933) The Socialisation of Banking. p. 22; About gold.


 * Islands of conscious power in this ocean of unconscious co-operation like lumps of butter coagulating in a pail of buttermilk.
 * D.H. Robertson, quotes in: Ronald Coase (1937) "The Nature of the Firm". Economica 4.16 (1937): 386.

Quotes about Robertson

 * Professor Sir Dennis Robertson and Keynes were closely associated in the development of their ideas in monetary economics during the 1920s. Robertson had published his textbook Money in 1922 which went through a number of editions.
 * John Cannon Gilbert (1982) Keynes's Impact on Monetary Economics. p. 20


 * I regard Mr. Hawtrey as my grandparent and Mr. Robertson as my parent in the paths of errancy, and I have been greatly influenced by them.
 * John Maynard Keynes, “Alternative Theories of the Rate of Interest.” Economic Journal 47 (June 1937): 241–252.