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ence. The book was not completed until late 1935, and was published, in February 1936, as
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. By the time it came out, Britain, the
United States, and Germany were all on the road to recovery and the book itself did not have
much impact on immediate government policy. Nevertheless, it was to be Keynes s master-
piece. While it was not universally accepted and indeed remained bitterly disputed for many
years, it transformed the understanding of the modern monetary economy and still today
provides the foundation for much of the government and central banks management of the
system.
A year after The General Theory was published, in the spring of 1937, Keynes suffered
the first of his many heart attacks. He was diagnosed with a chronic cardiac condition
caused by a bacterial infection of the heart valves. For the next three years he was almost an
invalid. In 1939, he fell into the hands of a Dr. Janos Plesch, a Hungarian Jewish émigré,
who, according to Keynes, was a cross between a genius and a quack. In addition to some
highly unorthodox protocols three-hour sessions of ice packs placed on the chest or Dr.
Plesch jumping up and down on his patient as he lay in bed the doctor put Keynes on a
course of the newly discovered and much in vogue sulfa drugs, the first and only effective an-
tibiotic in the years before the large-scale use of penicillin. Though his heart condition was not
completely cured, under the care of the eccentric Dr. Plesch whom Lydia nicknamed The
Ogre Keynes was at least able to return to work.
During the 1930s, Keynes s speculative activities made him a rich man. After losing 80
percent of his money when commodity prices collapsed after 1928, he had ended 1929 with a
portfolio of under $40,000. He shifted his strategy from short-term speculation to long-term in-
vestment and at the lows of the Depression put together a concentrated portfolio of a select
number of British and American equities. Convinced that Roosevelt would succeed in reviving
the U.S. economy, Keynes used margin to leverage his portfolio by as much as two to one.
By 1936, his net worth was close to $2.5 million the equivalent today of $30 million. Though
the bear market of 1937 more than halved this, by 1943 it had recovered to $2 million.
By the late 1930s, Keynes was the most famous economist in the world and a pillar of the
British establishment. He was elevated to the peerage in 1941, as Lord Keynes of Tilton, and
much to the amusement of his bohemian Bloomsbury friends, was to be found regularly in at-
tendance at the House of Lords. He was even invited to be a director of the Bank of England
by his old opponent, Montagu Norman. While they continued to disagree I do enjoy these
lunches at the Bank: Montagu Norman, always absolutely charming, always absolutely
wrong, he remarked after one of his regular weekly meetings it was now Keynes s ideas
that were in the ascendancy.
When the Second World War broke out in Europe, Keynes became an unpaid economic
adviser to the chancellor of the exchequer. Within a short time he was Britain s principal war-
time economic strategist. Determined to avoid a repeat of the mistakes of the First World War,
which had largely been financed by printing money, Keynes designed the framework for pay-
ing for this war without as much recourse to inflation. He also acted as the principal negotiator
for Britain with the Americans over the scope, terms, and conditions of Lend-Lease.
In 1942, he turned his attention to planning for the postwar world. After the First World
War, central bankers had tried to re-create the golden age before 1914, to which they looked
back so nostalgically. Keynes, in putting together his plan for a new international monetary
system, had no such illusions no one, least of all him, looked back except with horror to the
chaos of the twenties and thirties.
In developing his ideas for the postwar world, Keynes sought to create an international fin-
ancial system based like the gold standard on rules while tempering its rigidity. His plan called
for currencies to be pegged but adjustable. In contrast to the gold standard, under which
currency values were supposed to be immutable fixed points, countries would be allowed to
alter the value of their currencies when their economic circumstances changed. He was de-
termined to avoid the need for the sort of straitjacket policies of the twenties and thirties when
Germany and Britain had been forced to hike interest rates and create mass unemployment
to protect currency values that were in any case unsuitable.
A second element of the plan was an international central bank. In order to avoid the
chronic shortage of gold reserves that had prevented the global financial system from func-
tioning smoothly between the wars, Keynes proposed creating an institution that would lend
money to countries in need on a temporary basis, rather like an overdraft facility at a bank.
Luckily for Keynes, the Americans began working independently on a similar conception.
The architect of the U.S. plan was Harry Dexter White, the assistant secretary for international
affairs at the U.S. Treasury. White had been born in Boston in 1892 of Lithuanian parents who
had fled the czarist pogroms. Educated at Stanford and Harvard, he had eventually joined the
Treasury in 1934 as a New Dealer and enjoyed a meteoric rise within the department through
a combination of hard work, intelligence, and flattery in the right places.
Short and stocky with a round face, rimless glasses, and fleshy lips topped by a trim mus-
tache, White was an unprepossessing man with few friends. He seemed unable to resist be-
ing overbearing and rude in his professional dealings, even to his colleagues, and he has
variously been described by those who knew him as the unpleasantest man in Washington,
a son-of-a bitch, and an intolerable human being. Keynes, who was remarkably able to put
up with people s foibles and idiosyncrasies, wrote that he has not the faintest conception of
how to behave or observe the rules of civilized discourse. But even though White was often
overtly anti-British, Keynes grew to develop great respect for his incisive intelligence, his
single-mindedness, and his drive.
White also happened to be a Soviet agent, originally recruited in 1935 to the same spy
ring that included Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. During the war, along with several col-
leagues at the Treasury s Division of Monetary Research, whom he talked into the cause, he
did much to support the Soviet war effort and beyond. As the principal Treasury representat-
ive on interagency committees dealing with international affairs, White handled more pieces
of classified information than any other single official in the administration, including the pres-
ident, and passed on secrets about the whole range of U.S. financial policies to Soviet intelli-
gence, including U.S. strategy on financial aid to the USSR. He helped the Communist cause
in China by delaying payments of American aid to Chiang Kai-shek, and arranged for the U.S.
government to furnish the Soviets with a duplicate set of printing plates of the currency to be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
