Background
CASSEL, Karl Gustav was born in 1866 in Stockholm, Sweden.
CASSEL, Karl Gustav was born in 1866 in Stockholm, Sweden.
Dr (Mathematics) Uppsala University, 1895.
He became professor of economics at Stockholm in 1904. In 1920 he achieved international recognition for his Memorandum on World Monetary Problems. In 1922 he was financial expert with the Swedish delegation to the International Economic Conference in Genoa. In the same year he was engaged by the Soviet Union as adviser to the newly created Russian State Bank. His Rhodes lectures at Oxford were published as The Crisis in the World's Monetary System (1932), in which he advocated a permanently managed currency. Later he advocated a controlled currency inflation. Cassel served as tax and financial expert for the Department of Finance in the Swedish government. Among his books, The Nature and Necessity of Interest (1903) emphasized the relationship between interest and the age-distribution of wealth; Theoretische SozialökonomieSozialokonomie (1918) presented the neoclassical viewpoint on economic theory; Money and Foreign Exchange After 1914 (1922) studied the contemporarily important problem of unbalanced foreign exchanges and offered the purchasing-power parity explanation of exchange rates, i.e., if two currencies have been inflated, the new normal rate of exchange will be equal to the old rate multiplied by the quotient between the degrees of inflation of the two countries. His Downfall of the Gold Standard (1936) held that gold had failed as a standard of value and a means of payment.