Henry Cutting

Upon his first visit to Richmond, then a small town in the east bay, he fixed upon the potential of its harbor, which he believed could "make a big city".

[3] In 1904, he founded the Port Richmond Canal and Land Company, of which he was the president for several decades, for the purpose of developing the harbor.

This company played an important role in the Richmond economy, up to that point dominated by Standard Oil.

Primarily an attack on the gold standard as "a Straight-jacket on Industry, the Strangle Hold on Progress and a Killer of Prosperity", the book advocated a system of public credit and the regulation of banks as "public utilities" which would nonetheless remain in private hands.

Despite the similarity of his argument to the views of more famous economists of the nineteen-twenties and -thirties such as Irving Fisher, Ralph Hawtrey, Gustav Cassel and John Maynard Keynes, he received little notice or credit.

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 instigated a number of reforms similar to those that Cutting had proposed, though it is unclear whether his work had any influence on the legislation.