Although the spectacular collapse of the global economic was apparently sudden and unpredicted, it is a crisis that has been building since the structure of the global economy was put in place in the desperate days of the mid-1940s. I want to take a step back from the feverish debates taking place in the Eurozone and explore the roots of the crisis in the agreements reached at the end of the Second World War, and question the rather dubious credentials of the man who can be said to have emerged victorious from those negotiations.
In these days of Depression and the failure of the neoliberal economic model many eyes are cast back nostalgically to the 1930s and the work of Keynes is receiving a particularly rapid rehabilitation. Keynes is identified most strongly with his support for government involvement in the management of national economies. This was a lesson learned the hard way during the last global depression, and that was deliberately unpicked by intellectual and political strategies dating from the 1970s onwards. In contrast to George Osborne, Keynes focused on the national economy as a system. His idea of the multiplier effect expressed the way that government spending is not money wasted or added to a pile of debt, but rather generates further cycles of spending. It thus stimulates economic activity, supports livelihoods and generates further tax revenue.
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