In early July 1949 Gaitskell shared Chancellor of the Exchequer Stafford Cripps' worries that Treasury officials were too "liberal" and too reluctant to implement socialist measures. Like Cripps and Dalton, Gaitskell was a devotee of cheap money. Not only were higher interest rates seen as associated with the Gold standard and the deflationary policies of the 1920s, but the policy preference in the 1940s was for quantitative controls (e.g. exchange controls in finance, or rationing of physical goods) rather than the price mechanism. Interest rates, which had been cut to low levels in the 1930s, did not begin to be used as an instrument of policy again until after the Conservatives returned to power in 1952.