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In “how to pay for the war”, a pamphlet published in 1940, John Maynard Keynes looked back on the way that the British government had, in the late 1910s, tried to pay off enormous quantities of debt with a combination of higher taxes and inflation. Wages had not kept up with inflation, meaning “that consumers’ incomes pass[ed] into the hands of the capitalist class”. Meanwhile the rich, as bondholders, had benefited from interest on the loans. Read More…
