Often obituaries act like long ribbons that run directly from your newspaper or monitor to a frozen moment in the past, and jolts a re-cognition of that moment.
Sometimes it’s a huge historic moment. I’m sure that when Nixon died, people of a certain age range flashed to the steps of a helicopter on August 9, 1974.
Sometimes it’s a huge moment masquerading as a small one. Ezra Solomon takes us back to March 1973, when the value of the U.S. dollar was allowed to “float“, untethered to the value of gold for the first time in 6,000 years of human currency. That’s huge.
Here in anniversary-happy America, I’ve never once celebrated this date. Have you?
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Ezra Solomon, Who Shaped Finance Theory, Dies at 82
December 19, 2002
By PAUL LEWIS
Ezra Solomon, an economist at Stanford University whose work helped shape modern theories of corporate finance, died on Dec. 9. He was 82.
The cause was a heart attack, said the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which announced his death on Tuesday.
Dr. Solomon’s best-known book, “The Theory of Financial Management,” appeared in 1963, shortly after he became a professor at Stanford. It is regarded as having helped change the study of finance from a descriptive process into a more rigorous, theory-based discipline.
He served on the president’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1971 to 1973, when the Nixon administration suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold and imposed an import surcharge and wage and price controls to try to recast the international financial system.
A result was the end of the so-called Bretton Woods system of fixed but adjustable exchange rates for major currencies. That system, established at the end of World War II, was eventually replaced by the present system of floating exchange rates.
Dr. Solomon was recruited to the council by its chairman, Paul W. McCracken. At his Senate confirmation hearings in June 1971, Dr. Solomon hinted at the startling economic moves to come that August when he indicated support for a floating dollar instead of one tied to gold.
“I am not against letting the dollar float; it is one way of finding parity,” he said. “It may become necessary that in the future we take the initiative and let the dollar float.”
Ezra Solomon was born on March 20, 1920, in Rangoon, Burma, when it was a part of British India. He graduated from the University of Rangoon in 1940 and then fled the Japanese army by going to India, where he joined the Royal Navy.
In 1950, he received his doctorate from the University of Chicago. In 1956, he joined the graduate business school there as a professor of finance. He moved to Stanford in 1961. He was the author of 13 books.
His wife, Janet, died last month.
He is survived by three daughters, Catherine Shan Solomon of Newark, Calif.; Ming Solomon Lovejoy of Eureka, Mont.; and Laura Solomon-Oyarce of Stanford, Calif.
Copyright 2002 New York Times Company (Registration required)
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