Author: John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes went to the Paris peace conference in 1919 as the Treasury's representative and resigned that May over what was being agreed. The Economic Consequences of the Peace appeared in December and sold enormously. Its case is arithmetic before it is politics: the reparations demanded of Germany exceeded what the German economy could produce and export, so enforcing them would mean deflation, unemployment and unrest there, and the damage would not stay inside German borders. In preparation for the conference he had argued either for no reparations at all or for a ceiling of two thousand million pounds. The book also carries close portraits of Clemenceau, Wilson and Lloyd George that made him enemies for life. It built his public reputation more than a decade before the General Theory built his professional one.