England’s ephemeral return to gold in the first half of the 1920s and, just a few years later, the terrible impact of the Great Depression greatly affected economic and political thinking. The discussion on monetary reform ceased to be confined to the purely academic domain.
The advocates of reform (including, albeit with different approaches, economists such as Keynes, Fisher, Hawtrey and Robertson) focused primarily on the “artificialness” of the value of gold: demand for the metal depended crucially, among other things, on the conventions that governed the monetary systems of the various countries.