In the beginning, the neoliberals were almost all gold bugs. At the founding MPS conference in 1947, nearly every participant agreed that the reintroduction of the classical gold standard with liberalized capital movements would be the monetary system consistent with the core values of the new society, while flexible exchange rates were regarded as Keynesian, nationalist, and unstable. Yet there was dissent even at this first conference as the renowned Princeton economist Frank Graham presented the idea of a “Commodity Reserve Standard” as a preferable alternative to the gold standard. Graham died in 1949 and could not continue the project further, but it was taken up by Milton Friedman, whose arguments for flexible exchange rates developed in the years following the foundation of the MPS bore a clear resemblance to those of Graham.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 428