There's no automatic mechanism in a market system that reconciles the desire to save and the desire to invest. And therefore, the government has to sort of do something or the Federal Reserve, the Fed, or the Central Bank, or whatever, it has to intervene. It has to create enough investment for the economy not to suffer from a fall in aggregate demand. So, if you don't have a balance within the market system itself, then you need an external balance and that's what I think Keynes believed.
Robert Skidelsky, Baron SkidelskyThe psychology of the saver and the psychology of the investor is very closely connected with Keynes' distinction between risk and uncertainty. When the future is uncertain, he thought that a lot of saving would be directed towards securing, securing more, getting more security in the present, rather than building wealth in the future, which was the classical view, you save in order to invest, in order to consume more later on. What he had called the propensity to hoard or liquidity preference would normally be stronger than the inducement to invest.
Robert Skidelsky, Baron SkidelskyBankers were scapegoats for the whole Reagan-Thatcher era, which exalted finance and humbled industry, and which had allowed the fruits of progress to accrue disproportionately to the rich and super-rich.
Robert Skidelsky, Baron SkidelskyAmericans feel as though the only position they can possibly occupy is number one and if they're not number one, well, the end of the world has come.
Robert Skidelsky, Baron SkidelskyHayek became in his later years the dominant intellectual influence of the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Robert Skidelsky, Baron SkidelskyWhen you think of everything in terms of just money, then almost nothing is enough. I mean, how much money is enough? Because it's hard to translate money into goods. And I think people, once, I think there's a lot things can believe, and once they start thinking about wealth in terms of money, they lose the idea of enough-ness.
Robert Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky