Columbia International Affairs Online: Policy Briefs

CIAO DATE: 05/2009

More Panic

John H. Makin

October 2008

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

Abstract

Over the past several months as central banks and treasuries have struggled to manage a financial panic and avoid or diminish its soon-to-appear devastating impact on the global economy, I have often thought about the efforts of two great economists to understand the lessons of the Great Depression. John Maynard Keynes's monumental General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936, showed how a failure to understand the nature of the demand for money contributed to the Great Depression. "The importance of money essentially flows from being a link between the present and the future," Keynes said.