The short-term fixation on private benefits by hook or by crook, which has turned yesterday’s financial wizards into today’s leading exponents of white collar and financial crime, must give way to a clearer focus on the longer term and the public good aspects of our financial interaction with our fellow-man. Now, in today’s world, Keynes and his precepts are experiencing a revival.
It has taken open clamouring for government interventionism and the introduction of fiscal stimulus measures on a mind-boggling scale to remind us that “we are all Keynesians now.” As Greenspan reminds us in his autobiography, Time Magazine declared this way back in 1965, that is well before those words became indelibly associated with US President Richard Nixon.