One of those rare individuals who achieved both tremendous success and lasting fame was David Ricardo. After his family disinherited him for marrying outside his Jewish faith, Ricardo made a fortune as a stockbroker and loan broker. When he died, his estate was worth more than $ 100 million in today's dollars. At age twenty-seven, after reading Adam Smith's The Riches of Nations, Ricardo got enthusiastic about economics. He penned his first economics paper at age thirty-seven and then spent the following fourteen years — his last ones — as a practising economist.

"Ricardo first received notice of the" bullion controversy "by economists. He wrote in 1809 that England's inflation was the result of the tendency of the Bank of England to issue excess banknotes. In short, Ricardo was an early believer in the philosophy of capital in quantity, or what is now known as monetarism.

The protectionist Corn Laws, which prohibited imports of wheat, were also opposed by Ricardo. Ricardo formulated the concept of comparative costs, now called comparative benefit, in advocating for free trade, a somewhat subtle idea that is the primary basis for the confidence of most economists in free trade today. The premise is this: a nation that trades goods it can buy from another world at cheaper prices is better off than if it had manufactured the products at home.