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Which economic ideas shaped Ezra Pound’s writing during the Great Depression?

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Pound, Ezra — Ezra Pound Ezra Pound, photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn, c. 1913.

During the Great Depression, Ezra Pound’s writing was heavily influenced by his interest in economic history and his advocacy for Social Credit.1

Pound was introduced to this economic theory in 1918 by its founder, Clifford Douglas. Social Credit posits that economic depressions are caused by the maldistribution of wealth resulting from insufficient purchasing power. Pound became convinced that global instability and wars were the direct result of a fundamental misunderstanding of money and banking, as well as the manipulation of financial systems by international bankers.1

These economic theories became an obsession that profoundly shaped his later work, particularly his long poem The Cantos, which increasingly incorporated his views on monetary reform. During the 1930s, he published several prose works on these topics, including ABC of Economics (1933) and Social Credit (1935), and expressed his political alignment by declaring his admiration for the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.1