Background
Walter S. Salant was born on October 24, 1911, in New York City. He was the son of Aaron Bennett and Josephine Adele (Scheider) Salant.
The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United Kingdom
Salant attended the lectures of Keynes at Cambridge University.
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Salant graduated from Harvard in 1933.
Walter S. Salant was born on October 24, 1911, in New York City. He was the son of Aaron Bennett and Josephine Adele (Scheider) Salant.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1933, Salant attended the lectures of Keynes at Cambridge University. Also at Harvard, he joined the celebrated fiscal policy seminar run by Professors Alvin Hansen and John Williams that explored Keynes's new ideas and trained economists who went on to build a discipline forged in part on the Keynesian foundation.
Throughout his career, Salant held a series of Government positions. He served in the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commerce Department in the 1930s, and, in the 1940s, the Office of Price Administration and other agencies that designed the national strategy for wartime price controls. He was a senior staff member for international relations on the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1946 to 1952.
He later served as a consultant to NATO and in the Treasury Department in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.
He left the Government in 1954 to become a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, staying there until 1976.
Salant was the author of a Brookings study in 1963, forecasting, without complete success, the balance of payments of the United States in 1968. He wrote, with Emile Despres, a controversial article which appeared in The Economist in February 1966 entitled "The Dollar and World Liquidity - a minority view". Salant's other publications include World-wide Inflation: theory and recent experience (1977) and European Monetary Unification and its Meaning for the United States (1973).
(a clarification of concepts)
1978Walter Salant was a member of the University-National Bureau Committee of Economic Research, American Economic Association, Royal Economic Society, and Phi Beta Kappa.
Quotes from others about the person
"The General Theory analyzed economies that engaged in no trade. Salant applied its lessons to a world that increasingly relied on trade and foreign investment - analyzing how trade surpluses play the same role in an economy to create employment and output as do private investment or Government spending." - Tobin
On January 25, 1939, Salant married Edna Goldstein. The marriage produced two children, Michael Alan and Stephen Walter.