Early Professional Life
Currie remained at Harvard until 1934 as a lecturer and assistant to, successively, Ralph Hawtrey, John H. Williams, and Joseph Schumpeter. Paul Sweezy was one of his students in money and banking at Harvard.
In 1934, Currie constructed the first money supply and income velocity series for the United States. He blamed the government's "commercial loan theory" of banking for monetary tightening in mid-1929, when the economy was already declining, and then for its passivity during the next four years in the face of mass liquidations and bank failures. Instead, he advocated control of the money supply to stabilize income and expenditures. In a January, 1932 Harvard memorandum on antidepression policy, Currie and fellow instructors Harry Dexter White and Paul T. Ellsworth urged large fiscal deficits coupled with open market operations to expand bank reserves, as well as the lifting of tariffs and the relief of interallied debts.
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