Keynes sobre inflação, moeda e déficits fiscais

"...Keynes (1919 [1971], pp. 144, 149) laid responsibility for the inflation at the door of the “belligerent governments” during the war, most of whom were continuing to monetize their debts, rather than to pay for their expenditure by raising taxes or issuing loans. Whether due to “necessity or incompetence,” it was a policy which “a Bolshevist might have done by design.” The problem with ongoing inflation was that, with the arbitrary “rearrangement of riches” and wild fluctuations in prices it brought, confidence in the credit system would collapse, thereby undermining the “ultimate foundation of capitalism.” The disintegration would be

accelerated by the way that governments were attacking “profiteers” in an attempt to shift the blame for the inflation: “These ‘profiteers’ are, broadly speaking, the entrepreneur class of capitalists, that is to say, the active and constructive element in the whole capitalist society, who in a period of rapidly rising prices cannot help but get rich quick whether they wish it or desire it or not.” The European situation was now dire. Facing starvation, “Men will not always die quietly . . . in their distress [they] may overturn the remnants of organisation, and submerge civilisation itself.” 

.. In the Economic Consequences, Keynes (1919 [1971], p. 160) was more sanguine, arguing that there was not “the slightest possibility of catastrophe or any serious likelihood of a general upheaval of society” in Britain. Keynes was, however, a vehement supporter of the increases in interest rates the Bank of England implemented in November 1919 and April 1920 (Moggridge, 1992, pp. 354–60). Indeed, when consulted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in February 1920, Keynes (1920 [1977], p. 184) argued for an even tighter monetary policy, on the ground that continuing high inflation would “strike at the whole basis of contract, of security, and of the capitalist system generally.” As Donald Moggridge (1992, p. 359)  subsequently observed in his biography of Keynes, the “argument was that of the author of the Economic Consequences.”

Full text: Retrospectives: Who Said “Debauch the Currency”: Keynes or Lenin? 

Michael V. White and Kurt Schuler
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