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?
*************************************************************************
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)
11:32:48 PM 
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