Quotes from Robert Skidelsky

I begin to see', he said to Virginia Woolf in 1934, 'that our generation -yours & mine… owed a great deal to our fathers' religion. And the young… who are brought up without it, will never get so much out of life. They're trivial: like dogs in their lusts. We had the best of both worlds. We destroyed Xty & yet had its benefits.

He argued, in the spirit of Mill, that 'whatever the immediate consequences of a new truth may be, there is a high probability that truth will in the long run lead to better results than falsehood'. This was very much in line with his attack on Moore's argument for following generally accepted rules rather than using individual judgement. However, he conceded that the 'modern prejudice in favour of truth [may be] founded on somewhat insufficient bases'.

In three articles to The Times, published in October 1939, and reproduced as a pamphlet, How to Pay for the War, Keynes put forward a scheme for compulsory saving or 'deferred pay', in which excess purchasing power would be mopped up by a progressive surcharge on all incomes (with offsets to the poor in the form of family allowances), part of which would be given back in instalments after the war in order to counteract the anticipated post-war slump.

In 1939, Keynes had doubted whether 'capitalistic democracy' would ever be willing to make the 'grand experiment' which would prove his theory. In war the experiment was made, and the theory worked. The economy was run at full capacity with only very moderate inflation.

Keynes's second major contribution to the post-war order was his part in establishing the Bretton Woods system. This was unfinished business left over from the collapse of the old order. Even in his Tract period Keynes was not a currency floater. He wanted a 'managed' exchange-rate system – something consistent with de facto stability of exchange rates for long periods.

The root of credit is the Latin word credo, 'I believe

By the end of 2007, UK household debt had reached 177% of disposable income, mortgage debt 132%. Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times in September 2008

The securitization of mortgages was not new; its explosion after 2000 was the result of three deregulating policy decisions: the repeal in 1999 of America's Glass–Steagall Act of 1933