Soon after completing his Tract on Monetary Reform, Keynes began work on a new volume on monetary theory. Although interrupted by other commitments and activities, he worked on it through 1924 and on 28 July 1925, after conversations with Alfred Harcourt, his American publisher, signed a contract for a volume entitled The Theory of Money and Credit. In July 1926, Keynes signed a similar agreement with Messrs Macmillan for its British publication. At this stage, the work was to be in one volume and to appear in 1927.

Little remains of Keynes's early work on this book. During 1925 he was in correspondence with D. H. Robertson concerning the latter's Banking Policy and the Price Level (this correspondence will appear in a later volume in this series). At that time, the collaboration between the two men was so close that, as Robertson put it concerning chapters v and vi of his book, ‘neither of us now knows how much of the ideas therein contained is his and how much is mine…happily there is less need for meticulous disentanglement as his own version of the Theory of Credit is to be published very soon’. This collaboration certainly appears to have affected Keynes's monetary thinking for, as he put it to Robertson ten years later, after the publication of The General Theory: ‘I certainly date all my emancipation from the discussions between us which preceded your Banking Policy and the Price Level.