THE DOLLAR AND WORLD LIQUIDITY

This is the story of the balance of payments problem and the ""defense of the dollar"" during the Kennedy years. Except for the first and last chapters, which have been written after the fact in order to supply some ""retrospective rationalization,"" the book consists of speeches delivered or articles published by the author between 1961 and 1964, while he was Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs. There is thus a flavor of immediacy which helps to make the highly technical economic considerations more readable than they would otherwise be for the layman, and Mr. Roosa is incidentally spared many of the responsibilities and dangers of historical assessment. Mr. Roosa is reasonably proud of his department's record in articulating and strengthening international financial cooperation, and he is confident of continued progress in this direction. There is a definite need for deliberate creation of reserves, he feels, and he strongly favors a collective reserve unit system which would amount to an international currency; this would supplement the dollar in world finance, just as the dollar used to supplement the pound. Capacious appendices include all the important pertinent statements by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, as well as special reports from the Treasury department.