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| Link to The Guardian |
"The Wall Street crash was still a year away when in 1928, John Maynard Keynes spoke to an audience of Cambridge undergraduates. The great economist told the students that by the time they were old men, the big economic problems of the day would be solved. The capitalist system was capable of delivering such a sustained and steady increase in output, that workers would eventually have all the material goods they could possibly want. They would need to toil for only 15 hours a week, and could then spend the rest of the time enjoying themselves.
"... So what would Keynes make of a world in which lavishly-paid investment bankers work from dawn to dusk, and then decamp at the weekend to country-house hotels where they are waited on hand and foot by a new servant class, paid little more than subsistence wages? Not much, according to his eminent biographer, Robert Skidelsky, and his philosopher son Edward, in a book that draws heavily on Keynes's (rather patrician) views of what constituted the 'good life'.
"How Much Is Enough? argues that the modern world is characterised by insatiability, an inability to say enough is enough, and the desire for more and more money. Economics, a narrowly focused discipline in which there is no distinction between wants and needs, has driven to the end of a cul-de-sac. As in 1930, the Skidelskys say, the short-term need to get the global economy moving again should not deflect policy-makers from reforms that will lay the foundations of a saner, more stable world."
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| Link to Daily Telegraph |
Daily Telegraph:
"Kenneth Clarke: Put rogue bankers on trial"
"The justice secretary said that if bankers were found to have breached the law, they should be brought to trial.
" 'We are very bad a prosecuting financial crime in this country,' Mr Clarke said in an interview with Radio 4's Today programme."
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