GOLDSMITH, RAYMOND WILLIAM

GOLDSMITH, RAYMOND WILLIAM (1904–1988), U.S. economist. Born in Brussels, Belgium, Goldsmith received a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin (1927) and then studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He lived in the U.S. from 1930 and during the years 1934–48 he served with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the War Production Board, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was U.S. adviser on the 1946 German currency reform and on the 1947–48 Austrian treaty negotiations. Goldsmith became professor of economics, first at New York University (1958–59) and later at Yale (from 1960). Money and banking were his major interests. In an effort to find the means by which to measure wealth, he devised such methods as balance sheets, which tracked the flow of capital among various segments of the economy. His works include The Changing Structure of American Banking (1933), A Study of Saving in the United States (3 vols., 1955–56), Financial Intermediaries in the American Economy (1958), The National Wealth of the United States in the Postwar Period (1962), Financial Structure and Development (1969), The National Balance Sheet of the United States, 1953–1980 (1982), The Financial Development of India, Japan, and the United States (1983), and Comparative National Balance Sheets: A Study of Twenty Countries, 1688–1979 (1985). (Joachim O. Ronall / Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)