Keynes Masters of Money

This vast solar power plant being built in the remote Arizona desert

is part of the biggest economic rescue effort in history.

While the cost of action will be great,

I can assure you that the cost of inaction will be far greater.

With the economy still struggling,

the American government is shelling out three-quarters of a trillion dollars

to try to haul the country out of trouble.

And in Britain, billions are being spent to accelerate growth,

even by a government determined to cut borrowing.

Is this really the right road to take?

After the crash in 2008, the world seemed to be running out of cash.

But rather than cut back, governments spent huge amounts of money they didn¹t have.

Why on earth would they do that?

It¹s all goes back to the extraordinary ideas of this man,

the British economist John Maynard Keynes.

Quite simply, he changed the world.

I think it is true that he¹s one of the great figures of the 20th century

and in many ways of the 21st century.

Keynes thought capitalism was brilliant.

But left to its own devices, it could also go seriously wrong.

It was up to governments to step in to get the economy back on track.

He was the archetypal man in Whitehall, Westminster or Cambridge who thought he knew best.

Keynes has never been more relevant or controversial than he is today.

Because for the first time since the 1930s,

the problems he was grappling with then -

bank failures, international crises,

the possibility of a long economic slump - we¹re facing, too.

In this series, I¹ll tell you about the lives and thoughts of three extraordinary men

with radically different views.

Karl Marx, Friedrich Hayek and, tonight, Keynes.

They all saw that taming the growing power of money

was the crucial challenge for the modern world.

All three were intellectual giants

whose ideas have been a hidden force shaping world events,

changing the lives of every one of us.

But I think they have something special to tell us right now,

because they, more than anyone, taught us the awesome power of money,

the good that markets and capitalism could do and the enormous trouble they could cause.

I think they¹d know exactly what we¹ve been going through.

I want to know, can they help us find a way out?

The quiet hills of north-west England.

For me, a chance to experience economics in action.

ENGINE REVS

I¹m getting to try out rally cars competing in the Tour of Cumbria.

The sponsors, Pirelli, are getting a slice of the government¹s £2.4 billion fund

to help regional growth and employment.

They want to show me what the company¹s really all about.

Pirelli is one of the world¹s biggest tyre makers.

It¹s been manufacturing in Britain for almost a century.

It wants to develop some of its top ranges and beef up research and development.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

But the sums hadn¹t been adding up.

This factory is one of Carlisle¹s biggest employers.

There are about 750 workers here, producing 10,000 tyres a day.

Not so long ago, people worried the company would shift production overseas to cut costs.

A £2 million government grant has persuaded Pirelli to invest in Britain instead.

When we have a major investment, the confidence in people

to spend their wages is increased.

And the local economy benefits.

And it's not only Pirelli employees.

We have hundreds of suppliers and contractors who depend on this factory

and they benefit also when Pirelli increases its spend.

And also they recycle that money into the local economy.

It might seem surprising -

a handout to a private company, when the government's so worried about the mounting national debt,

now more than a trillion pounds.

But Keynes was quite clear.

There are times when we need to step in to make capitalism work for us,

even when that means spending money we don¹t have.

What Keynes said was that it was possible for government

to come in and make markets work better.

One way that it¹s often put is that Keynes saved capitalism from the capitalists.

Though for Keynes¹ critics, it¹s mistakes by governments that really cause the trouble.

When we find instances of economies being seriously knocked out of equilibrium,

it¹s generally been as a result of government policy mistakes.

But Keynes didn¹t really make a convincing case

that even when an economy was knocked out of equilibrium,

that government action could do better than allowing the economy to essentially mend itself.

So Keynes was either an economic saviour,

or the man who led us all astray.

But there¹s no argument that he changed our world

and the way we think about it.

He was at the centre of the debate 80 years ago and he¹s back there again today.

A great weight is lifted from us...

This is the only known film of Keynes speaking.

There's no danger of the exchange falling too far.

There's no danger of a serious rise in the cost of living.

It's a broadcast about economics, how to share out the world's resources.

Meanwhile, British trade...

But for Keynes, this was no dry science.

It was about changing the world for the better.

I think if we're looking at Britons who made a real difference in the 20th century,

the most obvious name would be Winston Churchill.

John Maynard Keynes is really not far behind.

Keynes spent years in this house in London,

developing ideas that helped shape some of the most important events of the past century,

helping to save capitalism from the Great Depression, funding the war against the Nazis,

and building a new post-war economic order

that helped pave the way for decades of growth and rising prosperity.

What¹s really extraordinary about Keynes from a modern perspective was his access.

Despite being so unconventional in his life and especially in his views,

he had the ear of anyone who mattered.

Presidents and Prime Ministers all listened to what he had to say.

Though it was only after his death that everyone started taking his advice.

I applied to university in 1965,

and the whole intellectual climate, not just in economics but politics,

was driven by the idea that Keynes had solved the economic problem.

By the late 1960s, Keynes' ideas were built into the fabric of pretty much every western economy.

But he didn¹t seem to have an answer to the high inflation of the 1970s.

After that, Keynesian fine-tuning was out

and free-market ideas gradually took over.

But when the world got into serious bother in 2008, Keynes was back.

It's ideas that mobilise the world, on right and left, good and bad.

And Keynes was the author of, in MY judgment,

the best suite of ideas about how to think about capitalism that there's been.

And if you think that counts, then he counts.

So what are these great ideas that have dominated our economic landscape for so long

and where exactly did they come from?

Keynes was born at the height of the British Empire, in 1883,

to middle-class parents who sent him to Eton and Cambridge.

So far, so conventional.

But at university he fell in with a very unconventional crowd, the Bloomsbury Set.

As a young man, he spent a lot of time here at their country retreat,

Charleston in Sussex.

It was a kind of commune for artists and writers and the one economist.

They did see themselves as very different.

They were tinged by that rather indefinable concept, bohemian.

They were very ahead of their time. They were pioneers about sexual behaviour.

They were pioneers on a political front.

They were pioneers in many aesthetic fields,

in writing and in the arts.

The Bloomsbury group allowed him to step outside of the box

and to think the unthinkable.

And that breadth of intellect that he had

allowed him to leap off cliffs with a confidence that there was no bottom.

Keynes immersed himself in the cultural world all his life,

collecting paintings, fine books, even founding the Arts Theatre here in Cambridge.

Perhaps it¹s no coincidence that a man with such wide-ranging interests

should have the vision to develop a radically new approach to economics,

Keynesianism, shorthand today for government efforts to control the economy.

Keynes was born, nearly 130 years ago, into a confident age.

Science had been marching forward in medicine, in engineering,

every year extending what was humanly possible.

But there was one domain where science had barely begun -

economics, the world of money and markets.

If we could tame capitalism, we could really shape our destiny.

Keynes fundamentally believed that.

But he also understood, maybe better than some of his followers,

just how difficult that was going to be.

Greek fury at the austerity they feel has been imposed on them by their European neighbours.

For Keynes, this might feel a bit familiar.

He saw at first-hand the disaster that can come from stronger countries

dictating economic terms to the weak.

That helped him form his first big idea.

In an interconnected world, when you beggar your neighbour you might well beggar yourself.

It was an idea forged by the horrors of World War I.

True to his Bloomsbury values,

Keynes didn¹t want to fight in the war.

But he was willing to use his economic brilliance to help finance it.

Keynes' job at the Treasury was to help channel loans from America to other countries in the alliance.

His time here brought home to him how integrated the global economy had become.

Isolation just wasn¹t an option.

The economic fate of entire populations

might come to depend on events hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.

Once the war was over, Keynes could see how hatred of the defeated Germans

might lead the victors to make a terrible mistake.

At the end of the First World War there was a great deal of obviously public hostility towards Germany.

It had been a disastrous war both in terms of lives and casualties,

but economically, too.

I think there was quite a strong feeling that Germany must be made to pay.

At the Palace of Versailles, where the peace treaty was signed,

British Prime Minister Lloyd George and his French and American allies relished their victory.

Keynes was a member of the British delegation here but, against his advice,

Germany was ordered to pay everyone¹s bills for the damage and suffering caused by the war.

How could Germany afford to repay that debt?

You need an economy that is running to produce money and wealth.

And then you can repay.

You cannot repay out of nothing.

Keynes was so outraged that he resigned from the Treasury

and retreated to his room in Charleston

to write his first major book, ªThe Economic Consequences of the Peaceº.

Brilliantly written, it became a best seller,

though some said, with his sympathy for the Germans, he should be awarded an Iron Cross.

He says, "If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe,

"vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp."

But the key point for me is,

he didn¹t just think it was immoral, the treaty, or unfair, he thought it was stupid.

He thought a desperate Germany wasn¹t going to keep the peace in Europe,

and it certainly wasn¹t going to contribute to prosperity.

It wasn¹t going to buy goods from Britain and help Britain recover from the war.

Something he kept coming back to one way or another throughout his life -

we¹re all in it together.

The Versailles Treaty brought one of the great powers of Europe to its knees.

As Keynes predicted, the German economy descended into chaos.

Their debts were so impossibly large, they ended up printing the money to pay the bills

which quickly led to hyperinflation and a thoroughly worthless currency.

Hyperinflation didn¹t just destroy the economy.

It destroyed the fabric of German society, people¹s hopes, too.

There are stories about people taking out all of their savings

to buy a single postage stamp for a suicide letter.

When Keynes warned that the Versailles Treaty would bring a catastrophe here,

even his admirers might have thought he was exaggerating.

But they didn¹t think that for long.

CROWD: Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

Just 14 years after the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler came to power.

World War II wasn't far away.

As Keynes had predicted, the price of getting economic relations wrong was calamity.

Keynes foresaw that the reparations were too onerous, would have to be adjusted

and that actually you were laying the seeds of the next European conflagration.

He thought it was unbelievably short-sighted. He was right.

So what would Keynes make of Europe today?

Well, once again he might see strong countries dictating economic terms to the weak,

though this time it's strong countries like Germany itself

insisting that crisis-ridden nations, like Greece,

sign up to tough budget cuts in exchange for emergency loans.

The newspapers show the depth of ill will that¹s built up as a result of the crisis.

You¹ve got the Germans talking about the Greeks as no-good scroungers.

But in Greece, well, there¹s no more taboo any more about comparing German leaders to Nazis.

But Keynes might say they were harking back to the wrong war.

The tough conditions being imposed on Greece might remind HIM, ironically,

of the deal imposed on Germany at Versailles.

The dominant thinking in Europe at the moment

is exactly repeating the mistakes I believe, certainly for Greece,

as was made at the end of the First World War.

There comes a point, if you visit on countries things they can never deliver, it will end in tears.

If you look at what's happening in the Eurozone today,

you have riots on the streets of Greece,

general strikes in Spain, general strikes in Portugal.

You can see, well, aren't we just failing to learn the lessons of history here?

If Keynes could join me in Berlin today,

he¹d surely appreciate the complexity of the crisis in the Eurozone

and he¹d understand why ordinary Germans feel it¹s time for Greece to pay its own way.

But he also understood that imposing too much austerity could be self defeating.

I think he would have said, "Let's make Greece strong, so then they can repay their debt."

As long as a debtor pays, the creditor is happy.

But as soon as a debtor gets into difficulties,

and if he's a very important debtor, the creditor has also problems.

Because he won't get his money back.

Faced with the crisis affecting the people of Europe today,

Keynes would undoubtedly have come up with some solutions.

In fact, years after the Treaty of Versailles,

he'd unveil a plan for countries to work better together.

But first, there was a more basic question,

how to steer the economy itself?

To tame the economy, to make it work for us,

Keynes realised you first had to understand how it worked.

And the tool for doing that - economics - was still young in the 1920s,

but it had grand ambitions.

People hoped you'd be able to predict the movement of economies,

like you could predict the movement of the planets.

Keynes was drawn to that idea as well but he came to the conclusion economies weren't like planets.

They were more like people.

You never really knew what they were going to do next.

In fact, he noticed, the times when economies looked most predictable,

were usually the times when things were about to go disastrously wrong.

It certainly felt like that in 2008,

when the world financial system imploded after one of the longest booms in history.

Many claim now to have seen it coming,

but at the time, many more behaved as if the good times would go on and on.

No return to Tory boom and bust.

Being too sure about the economic future

was another mistake that Keynes had warned about 80 years ago.

Because he'd made the same mistake himself.

After resigning from the Treasury after World War I,

Keynes retreated to the sanctuary of his old college, Kings in Cambridge.

He was a lecturer and later a bursar, looking after the college¹s finances.

He had a special interest in probability theory,

a branch of mathematics that tries to predict the future from the evidence of the past.

When he wasn¹t writing or studying, Keynes was often betting on the financial markets.

He needed money and he thought speculation was a good way to get it.

But it was also a great way for him to test his belief

that probability theory and statistics

could help you predict the way markets were going to move.

He had very mixed results.

In his early years as an investor, Keynes sat in bed every morning

poring over reams of statistics about currencies, shares, bonds and commodities.

When he was sure he¹d worked out which way the market would move, he¹d make the deals.

Cambridge academic David Chambers has spent a lot of time studying Keynes¹ investment strategies.

Given this economic knowledge that he had, this great thirst that he had for numbers and statistics,

he believed I think that he could define, delineate, the business cycle.

And as a consequence of that he would be able to pick

when was the right time to be in the stock market, to own shares,

and when was the right time to come out of the stock market into bonds,

government bonds in particular, or, alternatively, cash.

But none of Keynes¹s elaborate calculations pointed out the disaster just around the corner.

Wall Street before the crash in 1929 looked a lot like the tail end of our market boom.

Investors could see no end to the good times.

Armed with the very latest mathematical models, they thought they had everything covered.

Then the bubble burst.

World markets collapsed and Keynes lost money, along with millions of others,

paving the way for the Great Depression.

His confidence in predicting the future was gone.

He would have bitterly reproached himself for not foreseeing the Great Depression.

But he came to the view that the future is not like that,

that anybody who happens to predict it right

is likely to be doing so on the basis of luck rather than judgment.

Keynes¹ speculating days weren¹t quite over.

Years later, he thought he might have to store hundreds of tons of wheat in King¹s College chapel,

after a commodity trade went wrong.

But he did change the way he invested, and became a wealthy man.

He¹d learned lessons about the way economies work that we still struggle with today.

That you can never get rid of uncertainty and that economies are made up of people, not numbers.

More than anyone, Keynes wanted economics to be respected as a modern science.

But he knew it was never going to be a science you could reduce to a set of equations,

iron predictions,

because economists were always going to have one extra thing to deal with, human nature.

If you don't know about the future and you're trying to get a fix

on what's taking place anywhere in time,

you know, you would defer to the crowds.

If the crowd is moving in a certain direction, they must be right.

"The crowd's buying. What are they buying? I must buy, too."

"The crowd's selling, I must sell, too!"

And it's very animal. It¹s very herd.

This idea of herd psychology helped Keynes make sense of the economic bubble

that blew up in the years before the great crash of 1929.

It can also do a pretty good job explaining our own great financial crash in 2008.

In normal times, any economic textbook now or in Keynes¹ time

would say if the price of something goes up, people buy less of it.

If the price goes down, they buy more.

That's how markets work. Except, Keynes realised, when you have bubbles.

Then a different side of human nature takes over.

It's the side that says, "Oh, house prices are going up.

"Shares are going up. I shall buy more because the price is going to go up again."

Which, of course, it does. It becomes a self-fulfilling spiral.

Prices go up and up and up and up.

Eventually, the bubble will burst. It always does.

In the years before 2008,

did we forget what Keynes had taught us about herd psychology,

bubbles and the uncertainty of economic life?

Did the bankers, investors, politicians and the rest of us

simply get too confident in thinking the good times would go on forever?

I think inasmuch as people actually sat down and thought about what were the risks,

what are the uncertainties, then clearly a large number of people were manifestly found wanting.

And, of course, if you don't know what you're doing,

it's not surprising that you end up being smashed to bits and that's precisely what happened.

Keynes¹s big ideas, that countries shouldn¹t beggar their neighbours,

that markets were unpredictable, all came out of his own experience.

Now the Great Depression produced his most important idea yet,

and added real urgency to his need to tame the economy.

What he realised was, economies might sink

and then not automatically float back up.

Looking around the western economies today, that does sound a bit familiar.

In the early '30s, the outside world was deep in gloom,

with dole queues lengthening and factories closing everywhere,

but Keynes¹ life was blissful.

By now he was famous, and he'd shocked even his avant-garde Bloomsbury friends

by marrying a Russian ballerina.

Up till then, he¹d been gay.

Art, books, love affairs, for Keynes this was what life was all about.

But he understood, probably more keenly than his Bloomsbury friends with their inherited wealth,

that money kept the whole thing afloat.

You couldn¹t have a civilised society without a well-functioning economy.

When he was back in the real world on Monday morning,

he could see the British economy wasn¹t working at all.

Britain had been in a slump for years.

Classical economists said that if workers would just agree to wage cuts,

businessmen would invest again, create jobs, and the economy would revive.

But Keynes disagreed. He thought the way to recovery was being blocked by pessimism,

or low animal spirits.

The big insight of Keynes behind all of this

was that a market economy is not self-stabilising.

When you get very big changes in animal spirits, in sentiment,

the people who are producing to sell in the future

suddenly worry that actually maybe there won't be the demand in the future, so they stop producing.

To get out of that low output trap can be very difficult.

Keynes realisation that an economy could stay sunk indefinitely

was a radical break with conventional thinking.

The classical approach said the economy would get better, we just had to give it time.

But looking around, it seemed obvious to Keynes that it wasn¹t getting any better

and it seemed blindingly obvious why it wasn¹t.

Every time someone lost their jobs and joined the dole queue, they had less money to spend,

so that would mean fewer goods were bought.

It would probably mean more job losses.

You could get caught in a downward spiral with no obvious way out.

Now it seems equally obvious to us today,

but back then it was all very new.

Keynes thought the low animal spirits in the business world were now infecting everyone.

In a radio broadcast in 1931, he made a dramatic call for action.

ACTOR AS KEYNES: The slump in trade and employment

are as bad as the worst which have ever occurred.

Activity and enterprise, both individually and nationally, must be the cure.

Today, Keynes¹ followers have made similar calls.

Years after the start of the recession,

the economy is still struggling to get back to where it was.

You don¹t have to be Keynes to see animal spirits are low.

Whether his ideas can revive them is another question.

Keynes¹ insight that countries could just get stuck

was probably his most important contribution to economic thinking.

But he didn¹t just want to understand economies, he wanted to make them work better.

He had plenty of advice for getting out of a slump,

but the most controversial was that governments should spend money they haven¹t got.

To my mind, the biggest argument in politics today

is over whether countries have done too much of that since the crisis hit or not enough.

Keynes might have died almost seven decades ago,

but out here in the Arizona desert, his big idea for getting the economy moving again lives on.

At Gila Bend, they're building the biggest solar power plant of its kind in the world.

The site covers over three-and-a-half square miles.

Nearly a million mirrors will capture enough energy

to provide 70,000 American homes with clean power.

But for the people in this remote region, and for John Maynard Keynes,

probably the most important thing this plant will produce is employment.

Between my wife and I,

we probably spent two years out of work.

Thank God, not at the same time but...

But we, er, we took some very significant hits.

The company that sources our manpower tells me they receive 300 resumes per day.

There's a lot of people looking for work.

And the people who have jobs out here are very... feel very lucky to have their jobs.

In effect, this plant is part of a vast Keynesian experiment.

In the wake of the crash,

the US government stumped up three-quarters of a trillion dollars for projects like this one

to create jobs and growth.

In normal times, say the people who run this site,

they would have raised the billion and a half dollars to get things going from commercial banks.

But these aren't normal times.

Because of that downturn, we had to, er...

..look for alternative sources of financing.

And, of course, in this context

the Federal loan guarantee programme here in the US has helped a lot.

In fact without that kind of public programmes this plant would have never been a reality.

Now we¹re used to governments using their cash

to try to bring the economy to life in hostile environments where private money's drying up.

But back in Keynes¹ day, it was a much more controversial idea.

In the 1930s, Keynes spent weekdays at his home here in London¹s Bloomsbury district.

He wrote countless articles and pamphlets

explaining how something could and should be done to tackle this Great Depression.

In normal times, Keynes thought monetary policy was the best way to help the economy.

You cut interest rates to encourage people to borrow and spend more

and companies to invest.

But when animal spirits are really low that might not be enough.

Companies might not see the point of making new investments,

people might not want to borrow no matter how cheap it was.

That¹s when Keynes thought government did need to make up the gap with more public spending.

Keynes suggested the government should hire people to demolish South London and then rebuild it.

He wasn¹t serious, but he was making a serious point.

If the government borrowed to create jobs, people would spend more,

confidence would rise, and the economy would recover.

If you picked the right moment, he insisted the extra spending would pay for itself

by producing higher tax revenues.

He did have enormous trouble trying to persuade the Treasury,

the so-called "Treasury view",

that you should borrow at the bottom of a business cycle.

But in economic terms what you need is more demand in the economy

and you can do that in the ways Keynes suggested.

Naive Keynesian prescriptions of simply responding to recession

by raising the budget deficit, as if this had no effect,

no adverse effect, on other economic variables,

I really think are very dangerous policy prescriptions.

In the '30s, Keynes found that most British politicians had a similar view -

high borrowing was dangerous.

He thought he might have a more receptive audience in America.

After all, he was now a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic,

and the economic situation in America was desperate.

Gross national product was down to almost 70%.

You had unemployment nationally at 25%.

In places like Chicago and Detroit, unemployment was up to 50%.

Over half the population unemployed.

President Hoover¹s solution to the Great Depression had been spending cuts and tax rises.

He'd made an argument we¹ve heard others make more recently.

Balancing the country¹s books would create confidence and encourage investment.

Didn't happen. Never has happened.

When you cut back government spending

in a situation such as a recession or depression, demand goes down,

unemployment goes up, and it's a vicious circle.

Confidence isn't restored when unemployment goes up and when business goes down.

Confidence is eroded.

Hoover¹s successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had a different approach.

Again, echoing arguments made today,

he thought the government should spend its way out of trouble.

This nation is asking for action

and action now!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

When Keynes arrived in America, in 1934,

there¹s no evidence that he persuaded the US government to adopt Keynesianism.

They were doing it anyway.

Keynes had his one and only meeting with President Roosevelt.

By all accounts, it didn¹t go very well.

Keynes thought the President was no economist.

The President thought Keynes was a bit too clever for his own good.

But they did agree on the most important thing.

This was no time for government to sit on its hands.

It was time for an historic experiment.

The New Deal, a vast programme of government-funded projects

to put armies of jobless to work.

Ever since, it¹s been the celebrated example

of a Keynesian effort to boost flagging economies.

And there¹s no more iconic project of that era than this one.

Hoover Dam.

Built across the Colorado River, bordering Nevada and Arizona,

it was the biggest construction project in the world.

I would call it a Keynesian project, absolutely.

The government stepped in with money.

Built a deficit, and out of that came Hoover Dam,

which gave thousands, tens of thousands of people,

a new life, money to spend.

Armies of workers from across America

tunnelled for five years through mile upon mile of mountain rock

to build, what was in effect, a vast power generator,

providing electricity for huge swathes of the country.

It primed the economy.

165 million investment,

which produced billions in growth, economic growth.

Just eight miles away is Boulder City, built to house the workers building the dam.

All these houses along these avenues are what we now call "ding-bat houses".

They were the homes built for the workers.

They were put up to last through the construction of the dam. Very quickly built.

But because people stayed, which they didn't anticipate,

families still lived in them.

Roger Shoaff runs the town's hotel.

He thinks Boulder City shows how in a depression

extra government spending CAN trigger private spending and investment, too,

adding to the economic benefits.

It's what Keynes called "the multiplier".

By the end of the second year, they lived in a town, a full town,

fully operating town with retail stores and restaurants

and medical facilities and recreational facilities. It happened in less than two years.

Critics of Keynesian spending plans often say the benefits are fleeting and the costs permanent.

But Boulder City took root and thrived.

Those who still live here say if it hadn¹t been for the New Deal,

this would still be desert.

Hoover Dam might have helped the local area,

but it¹s actually a myth that the New Deal ended the Great Depression.

It took a world war and all the extra government spending that went with that, finally,

to bring the economy out of the doldrums.

You might wonder whether a world war was really the best test of Keynes¹ arguments.

But ever since then, so-called "Keynesian policies"

have been what governments do when faced with emergencies.

And the crisis of 2008 was the biggest emergency anyone had seen for a long time.

When the global financial system crashed,

the world faced the real possibility of another Great Depression.

Governments had been preaching the free market for years.

But faced with this economic disaster they reached again for the old Keynesian levers.

It was a classic Keynesian response.

When individuals and businesses stop spending money,

if the government also stops spending money at the same time,

then what happens? The economy, basically, crashes.

The aim was to boost confidence, or animal spirits,

by making it easier to borrow, invest and spend.

Interest rates were slashed to just half of one percent, the lowest on record.

We¹re all now in uncharted territory.

Then, when interest rates couldn¹t go much lower,

the Bank of England started pumping billions of pounds directly into the economy.

It¹s literally creating £75 billion in the next few months

to get money moving around the economy again.

Even VAT was temporarily cut.

It'll make goods and services cheaper and by encouraging spending it will help stimulate growth.

In 2009, with the global economy still tottering,

leaders gathered in London to endorse a Keynesian rescue plan for the entire world.

This is the day that the world came together

to fight back against the global recession.

I find it very hard to explain the collapse in world trade,

of over 15% between the end of '08 and the beginning of spring '09,

in terms of anything other than an extraordinary collapse of "animal spirits", or confidence.

Now some of that was turned around in 2009, but by no means all.

Even that great rescue plan of 2009 wasn¹t quite what it seemed.

For all Gordon Brown¹s talk, Britain's own stimulus plan was actually one of the smallest,

because our government was already borrowing more than any other advanced economy.

So even a Keynesian Prime Minister like Gordon Brown didn¹t think we could borrow a lot more.

His successor thinks we should borrow much less.

We now have a Prime Minister who, on one fundamental point, appears to disagree with Keynes.

Some of the normal things that governments can do to deal with a normal recession,

like borrowing to cut taxes or increasing spending.

These things won't work because they lead to more debt,

which would make the crisis worse.

The only way out of a debt crisis is to deal with your debts.

I suspect that Keynes probably wouldn't have used exactly the Prime Minister's formulation.

I think that Keynes would have accepted at some point

that you have to head back towards a more balanced budget,

particularly if you don't want to stack debts on future generations.

To me the remarkable thing is that countries like the UK,

that have a choice,

are voluntarily putting themselves through austerity

and, almost certainly, we will know, we know what will happen.

The economy will get weaker.

Erm, unemployment will go up,

and there will be an enormous amount

of unnecessary suffering.

This argument will run and run on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Arizona, the massive spending programme that built this solar power plant

and let thousands clock on for new jobs hasn't been a miracle cure for the US economy.

Maybe the medicine didn¹t work because the dose was too small.

Or maybe, the mountain of debt weighing on most western economies

means the Keynesian route to recovery is simply shut off.

We are in a stratosphere today

that we just have not seen before and maybe it's fine,

but no other countries, rarely, have seen these debt levels.

Public, private and other measures, they're risks.

By the 1940s, Keynes was riding high.

His theatre, here in Cambridge, was thriving.

He was back in the Treasury helping finance the Second World War,

and his books were being hailed as masterpieces.

But he had one last big idea to pursue,

with profound implications for the world, then and now.

Keynes¹s ideas for fixing broken economies had now been tested.

But towards the end of World War II,

he got a chance to leave his mark on the entire global economy.

In a more integrated world he was more convinced than ever

that countries needed institutions to force them together, make them co-operate.

The catastrophe after World War I could never happen again.

The single most important trip to America that Keynes ever took was in 1944

to the exclusive resort of Bretton Woods in New Hampshire.

He was joining delegates from over 40 different countries,

all charged with laying the foundations of a new post-war global economy.

They wanted to rebuild the system.

Not just from the war, but from the Great Depression.

The financial system had just been destroyed.

The economic chaos of the '20s and '30s was largely responsible for the war, Keynes believed.

Countries had all focused on charting their own path,

without very much thought for what was going around them.

The world had paid a terrible price for that failure to co-operate.

There was a determination among officials in London and Washington

that we couldn't do this again.

We had to fix the world's economy.

That we had to... We couldn't go back to the kind of economic crisis

we'd had before because we couldn't afford another world war.

As representatives from across the world gathered here at Mount Washington Hotel,

elsewhere there was still ferocious fighting.

But once the war was over, Keynes knew, for the world economy to prosper,

countries would need to work together much more closely.

Only two delegations at the conference really counted

Keynes¹ British team and the Americans.

Both agreed that there should be controls

to prevent currencies fluctuating too wildly against each other.

They agreed that institutions, that later became the World Bank and International Monetary Fund,

should be there to foster trade and growth in poorer economies.

Well, the big gain from it was the recognition

that countries need to work together to resolve their macro-economic problems.

It's just not enough to pretend that you can do it as an island.

You may be an island geographically but you're not economically.

But on one crucial issue, Keynes failed.

The Americans were adamant that rich exporting countries, like them,

shouldn¹t have to spend more and export less to balance world trade.

It was weak countries with big trade deficits that had to shape up.

If everyone at Bretton Woods had accepted Keynes' logic,

that it takes ALL sides to keep the global economy in balance,

the world today might be in a lot better shape.

This old East German television tower is a symbol of reunified Germany.

But these days feelings of European unity are in short supply.

Ministers here in Berlin want struggling Eurozone countries to impose tough measures

to get their economies into shape.

The stronger countries have been willing to help

by offering massive loans, but I don¹t think Keynes would have thought that was enough.

Keynes thought, for the global economy to work, it had to be a two-way street.

So the weak countries, that had run up a lot of debt with the rest of the world,

they did have to become more competitive, learn to pay their way.

But the rich exporters... Well, they had to do their bit as well -

spending more on other countries' goods and exporting less,

becoming a bit less competitive.

Now that¹s a bit of Keynesian advice that doesn¹t go down well here in Germany at all.

If you say Germany should export less or become less competitive,

the popular view is, "That's mad!"

Why getting us weak when others are already weak?

And, certainly, that's the wrong conclusion.

There are signs of movement on Germany¹s side of the street.

Domestic car sales have been going up.

But exports are still a central plank of the country¹s economic policies.

And car exports are up by almost a third in the past two years.

German consumers have been spending more lately.

But not enough to provide much of a selling opportunity for struggling countries like Greece.

That's a very popular approach, to tell German private households, "Please, spend more.

"Don't be so greedy with your money."

Er, but I think that's, that's wrong.

Because people look at their income and say, "I can't afford it, simply." And that's true.

I mean we have had very weak wage increases during the past years.

And that's the point where you have to have higher wages.

And these higher wages you could certainly spend.

And then German consumption would be much stronger than it was in the past and that will help us.

Memories of hyperinflation are still raw in Germany.

Few want to put their hard-won economic stability at risk for their weaker European neighbours.

The divisions between countries at a global level are even clearer.

Leaders pay lip service to Keynes¹ dream of a truly co-ordinated global economy,

where the strong work with the weak for the benefit of all.

But there¹s little sign of them actually doing it.

I think that Keynes would look at our world

the troubles in the Eurozone, the banking crisis

and say it was a pretty scary place,

without many of the checks and balances that he argued for at Bretton Woods.

But he'd also say - he DID say -

that a really global economy was tremendously exciting,

with huge potential to improve all of our lives.

If governments could only work out how to put into practise

that basic insight that he kept coming back to.

We really are all in it together.

Sure, it would be great to have better multinational institutions

and Keynes was a pioneer in that.

He was a big believer. In order to fix the international financial system that would be very helpful.

And maybe somebody with the sort of magnetism and gravitas

and stature of Keynes could somehow catalyse that.

But he is a rare person indeed.

Keynes left an extraordinary legacy.

He didn¹t just transform economics,

he changed the lives of billions of people around the globe.

There aren¹t many people born in the 1880s

whose name you hear as often as Keynes in current debates.

His ideas that countries shouldn¹t beggar their neighbours,

that economies were deeply unpredictable,

could get stuck in slumps, have changed the way we think about the world.

But what can Keynes actually do for us right now?

Back in Cumbria, it¹s clear what Keynes has done for them.

Government intervention will help keep Pirelli¹s tyre factory open,

and provide a lot of employment.

In the political mainstream, there aren¹t many who challenge Keynes¹ basic message

that you can¹t leave economies to drive themselves.

Keynes was a very dominant force in the 20th century

and my guess is he will remain a dominant force in the 21st century,

which is why I think he will go down as one of the greatest economists the world has produced.

80 years ago, building this dam eased the Great Depression.

With the government borrowing more cheaply than ever before,

you might think the case for New Deal-type investments was equally strong today.

But given the sheer volume of public debt, no-one can promise that piling on more borrowing

will be a miracle cure.

What is thought of as a typical Keynesian solution

to get more debt, borrow money, spend, spend, spend and cut taxes.

That needs to be used more judiciously here,

because, at the end of the day, you¹ve got to get rid of this debt.

This is a very long haul.

I don't think anything just boosts your way and zooms your way out of this.

There just is no magic bullet.

And what of Keynes¹ final big idea, that countries are all in it together?

Since Bretton Woods, the world has grudgingly accepted that we have to co-operate to prosper.

But we¹re struggling to make it work in practise.

He'd be worried. He'd be very worried.

He'd have been very concerned about the growth of inequality worldwide.

Er, he'd be very concerned that there was a return to beggar my neighbour policies.

I have no doubt that he would be warning of regional war

and all its dangers.

He'd be very frightened

that the circumstances that led to war in 14/18 and 39/45

were, on a slow-burn basis, unfolding in front of us again.

Maybe the biggest thing Keynes could do for us now

would be to remind us of the traits that guided him all of his life -

imagination and optimism.

He came along and was willing to examine these profound problems

in ways that no-one had done before.

His great legacy is that fundamental belief in humanity,

that fundamental belief in the ability of government and society

to dedicate itself to helping those that are less fortunate and need our help.

In 1946, Keynes suffered a fatal heart attack in his beloved Sussex Downs.

Just 62, he left a legacy that changed the world.

But he also left an enigma.

He thought we should try to tame the power of money to make it work for us,

but he also taught us that economies were fundamentally unpredictable.

It¹s a contradiction we¹re still grappling with today.

More than anyone, Keynes paved the way for activist government.

He said you could and should make the world economy work better.

The generation that rebuilt the global economy after the war

really were children of Keynes.

But when you read him today, there's another equally powerful message that comes through,

about the great unpredictability, uncertainty, of economic life.

You should never think you¹ve got it covered, that you¹ve abolished boom and bust.

That¹s the great paradox.

The man who did most to make economists arrogant

in their capacity to bend the world to their will,

also gave them or should have given them the best reasons for self-doubt.

Next time on the Power Of Money, Keynes' great adversary, Friedrich Hayek,

who looked at the same facts and drew exactly the opposite view -

the market needed to be set free and government should back off.

The Open University has produced six one-minute animations

to explain some of the key economic ideas that affect all of us.

So if you want to learn how to spot an invisible hand or other secrets of economics,

Go to...

And follow the link to the Open University.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd