Keynes and the Economy

3 Dec 2009

I only recently discovered Aaron Swartz blog and he seems to be doing some very interesting pieces. This one is about John Maynard Keynes and the current financial situation. I like this bit on investment:

It used to be, Keynes says, that wealthy men just thought investing was the manly thing to do. They weren’t going to sit around and calculate what kind of bonds yielded the greatest expected return. Bonds are for wusses. They were real men. They were going to take their money and build a railroad.

The stock market is, in many ways, a ridiculously abstracted concept, removed from the actual goods that we need.

The scary thing is that the more open our markets get, the faster people can move their money around and the more trading is based on this kind of speculation instead of serious analysis.

Go read Keynes, Explained Briefly by Aaron Swartz.