ONE day last week, the Wall Street Journal sent its reporters out in several cities to find out what people knew and thought about the gold crisis. In Philadelphia, their man encountered a secretary who confessed to being quite confused about it all and said somewhat plaintively: "I hope TIME magazine will come up with something this week."

For our friend in Philadelphia and others around the world, we have come up with the cover story on the future of money, focused mainly on the International Monetary Fund and its managing director, Pierre-Paul Schweitzer. As anyone can imagine, these are hectic days for Schweitzer, but he spent a good deal of time last week talking with our Washington economic correspondent, Juan Cameron, about the international monetary situation. And we must acknowledge some help from the Philadelphia secretary, for Schweitzer* had read what she told the Journal and decided that he wanted "to reach that young lady and explain to her what's going on in my world."

Looking through our files for background material to last week's news, we were pleased to confirm an impression that TIME has for years been telling what's going on in the money world, warning about impending dangers in the balance of payments deficit, discussing proposed solutions, pointing up the need for a new form of international monetary reserves. While such subjects are often considered too complicated to have wide reader appeal, we have felt that TIME'S readers want and need to know about them. So we have dealt with them in major stories through the years, including such cover stories as those on Federal Reserve Chau-man William McChesney Martin (Sept. 10, 1956), Treasury Secretaries Robert Anderson (Nov. 23, 1959), C. Douglas Dillon (Aug. 18, 1961), and Henry Fowler (Sept. 10, 1965).

While TIME is not in the predicting business, many of our stories look toward the future. It seems worth noting that our Essay "The Dollar Is Not as Bad as Gold" (Jan. 12), said that President and Congress would soon remove the 25% gold cover for U.S. currency -- and it happened two months later. This week's cover story, written by Gurney Breckenfeld, researched by Kathleen Cooil and edited by Champ Clark, not only tells what is going on but also looks into the future at what might happen in the months and years to come.

* Who recalled that two other members of his family have been on the cover of TIME: Uncle Albert Schweitzer, the legendary missionary (TIME, JULY 11, 1943), and Symphony Conductor Charles Munch ( Dec 19, 1949), who is his mother's brother.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.