Keynes, He's Cool Again!

A walk to the bankYou know who I mean: John Maynard Keynes. He’s in vogue (again). Economists are like fashion, they have a thirty year cycle.

Mukund misquoted Keynes on Twitter today. He wrote:

If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.

I responded with:

By the transitive property, if the bank owes you billions of dollars it owns you.

The actual Keynes quote is:

If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.

As quoted in The Economist (13 February 1982), p. 11. Close enough. I think the transitive property can still be applied here. Obviously I’m referring to our government bailout of the banks. An FDIC intervention doesn’t sound so bad to me. Although, I’m not sure the FDIC could scale to the level required by Citi and Bank of America.

When confirming the quote I came across this unrelated Keynes quote I find especially agreeable:

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

Right on.

One thought on “Keynes, He's Cool Again!

  1. Ahh. thanks for the quote correction. I actually read it on the NYT I think. But he's cool now, because his school of thought is on the money given the times

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