Another Tilt at the Keynesian Windmill

Wonder why interest rates are ridiculously low? Wonder why governments are so much in debt? Wonder why economies are forever performing below par? Look no further than the malign influence of John Maynard Keynes. He, of course, was not a bad man; he just had bad ideas. This has proved to be no impediment to their continuing currency.

I have an article in the December issue of Quadrant magazine (“Making sense of negative interest rates“) on the topic of trying to make sense of very low interest rates. My final paragraph included a reference to The Economist opining as follows: “The ECB’s critics tend to miss the underlying cause of low interest rates: weak demand across most of the rich world.”

I retorted: “Economists wouldn’t talk like that if they understood how economies actually work.” And they wouldn’t, if they had not been schooled in Keynesian economics.

Keynesian economics continues to be a blight on the economics profession and, consequently, on mankind…