Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

62 страница из 137

In contrast to Harry White, Maynard Keynes had a privileged upbringing. Born into an affluent academic family in Cambridge, his father Neville was a lecturer in moral sciences and a fellow of Pembroke College, while his mother, who had been educated at Newnham College, became the city's first female mayor. Educated at Eton, he had gone on to study mathematics at King's College Cambridge, where he was elected to a lifetime fellowship in 1908, at the age of 26. A liberal with a mischievous anti-establishment streak, he was a leading member of the Bloomsbury Set that included intellectuals and artists such as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, as well as Duncan Grant, Keynes’ one-time lover.

During WW1, Keynes served in the British Treasury and had a front row seat in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where the terms of the peace were hammered out. He quit in disgust three weeks before the Versailles Treaty was signed and went on to publish a highly critical account of those negotiations under the widely acclaimed title The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In this book, he painted withering portraits of the three leading figures of the conference – American President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and French Prime Minister Georges Clémenceau. Among Keynes’ key criticisms of Versailles was the high level of war reparations imposed. He had argued that, if the defeated Germany was ‘to be “milked”’, then she ‘must first of all not be ruined’.ssss1 Indeed, popular resentment of the economic hardship that reparations imposed on the German population was later exploited by the Nazis in their rise to power in the 1930s.