Sir Ralph George Hawtrey (22 November 1879, Slough – 21 March 1975, London) was a British economist, and a close friend of John Maynard Keynes.

He took a monetary approach towards the economic ups and downs of industry and commerce, advocating changes in the money supply through adjustment in the bank rate of interest, foreshadowing the later work of Keynes.

It was his view that the botched attempt to restore the international gold standard led to the Great Depression.

He had played a key role in the Genoa Conference of 1922, which attempted to devise arrangements for a stable return to the gold standard.

His father, a schoolmaster, left the profession for acting, where he met no great success; the family's impecuniousness led Ralph Hawtrey to seek the stable employment in the Civil Service.

Hawtrey argues that traders’ balances are relatively stable, and thus the supply of money (in a wide sense taken to include credit) and consumers’ income and outlay are concerned with the operational relationships.

The introduction of a banking system into the model allows agents to substitute borrowing power for money balances (Hawtrey, 1919, pp. 36–7).

Hawtrey points to a defect in the theory of an elastic supply of labour based on marginal utilities of product and effort, in Trade and Credit (1928).

while a difference between the marginal utility of the product and the disutility of effort may prompt an additional supply of labour "in the simple case of a man working on his own account" (1928, p. 148), Hawtrey argues, this is not the general case since: "the decision as to the output to be undertaken is in the hands of a limited number of employers, and the workmen in the industry are passively employed by them for the customary hours at the prevailing rates of wages" (1928, p. 149).

[8] During World War I, most countries, including the United States, effectively abandoned the gold standard to finance their wartime expenditures.

They recommended that the Federal Reserve pursue aggressive monetary policies to counteract the deflationary pressures after 1929.

The UK left the gold standard in September 1931 and Sweden suspended it shortly afterwards, with Cassel playing an important role in the latter.