considered to be the most influential economist of the twentieth century we'll be talking about what keynes could bring to today's economic crisis builds could ask you first could you explain to me in layman's terms what the government is doing to mend the economy and why you think it's not working well i don't think they're doing very much to mend the economy i think their policies of made things worse. the sad fact is that the british economy has been shrinking slowly almost for a year now rather like a very slowly leaking balloon and the government of been trying in one or two small ways to give it a bit of a stimulus but i think they're quite new initiatives and it's too early to say how much effect they'll have but in general i don't think they will have very much effect and so i don't think at the moment they're doing anything very much to help because there's an awful lot of talk about prioritizing the economy and it's the main thing that we have to work on but then on the same time you say that not very much has been done at all one thing is that they're blaming everyone but themsel

sign that we thought of the rails well that was a very long run i mean that was a long run idea that keynes had that in the end a successful capitalism should enable people to work less. and and enjoy life more and he thought hours of work over time would shrink as we got richer but that assume that we wouldn't fall into these holes that you know that progress would be steady and you wouldn't have any more slumps but we're in we're in a slump we had the big collapse and at this point the priority is to get as many people back to work as possible and get as much production as you can because that full speed things along speed the road to utopia. so i think you mustn't confuse the short what needs to be done in the short run and long run prosper one of the things that the railed keynes's theory is this consumerism that we've all fallen under the spell of where we have to work more to buy more to have more are you worried that more crises will follow because of the way we work and because of what we're working for it's a very good question i think we are consumption mad society and in order to

north robert skidelsky he's a professor of political economy and also the biographer of john maynard keynes widely considered to be the most influential economist of the twentieth century we'll be talking about what keynes could bring to today's economic crisis though it's good to ask you first could you explain to me in layman's terms what the government is doing to mend the economy and why you think it's not.

is robert skidelsky he's a professor of political economy and also the biographer of john maynard keyneswidely considered to be the most influential economist of the twentieth century we'll be talking about what keynes could bring to today's economic.

is robert skidelsky he's a professor of political economy and also the biography of john maynard keynes widely considered to be the most influential economist of the twentieth century we'll be talking about what keynes could bring to today's economic crisis let's get out the first would you explain to me in layman's terms what the government is doing to mend the economy and why you think it's not working well i don't think they're doing very much to mend the economy i think they had their policies are made things worse. the sad fact is that the british economy. has been shrinking slowly almost for a year now rather like a very slowly leaking balloon and the government of been trying in one or two small ways to give it a bit of a stimulus but i think they're quite new initiatives and it's too early to say how much effect they'll have but in general i don't think they will have very much effect and so i don't think.

is robert skidelsky he's a professor of political economy and also the biographer of john maynard keyneswidely considered to be the most influential economist of the twentieth century we'll be talking about what keynes could bring to today's economic crisis builds could ask you first could you explain to me in layman's terms what the government is doing to man the economy and why you think it's not working well i don't think they're doing very much to mend the economy i think that their policies are made things worse. the sad fact is that the british economy has been shrinking slowly almost for a year now rather like a very slow leaking balloon and the government of.

should be cutting and the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent to misquote keynes but the point is when this goes i just think you know hide it down at first me you've also written a book tell us about it yes i have got a book out funding it with a new publisher called unbound it's a book calling very much for change i try to explain the economic crisis and the drivers of the economic crisis but i found alternative explanations ike i place the entire blame for this economic crisis and the bloated financial sector in the bloated government sector i see it is entirely a consequence of our flawed system of money and so i i try to explain the economic crisis in these terms i'm trying to do what. malcolm gladwell who wrote outliers did for his subjects i'm trying to do a similar thing about economics and about this financial crisis and so and i offer solutions now i should say a book explaining the economic crisis all no but my background as a comedian and when you when you're on stage as a comic if you safe. things that people don't understand they don't love so it mak

improvement of the overall economic environment i mean this is a classic case of what john maynard keynes called pushing on a string i mean you can just keep feeding money to the bankers given all of these once you do well daria on one level what we need to see of course are a whole new set of policies that will actually reintroduce demand into the economy now winston churchill used to like to say of the united states that the united states always did the right thing and then he would pause for a long period of time and say after they have exhausted all other options now i think with both the european union and the united states we're coming very very close to the realization that we've exhausted all of the bad options if we may finally return to the kind of classical keynesian solutions which were applied to the crisis of the one nine hundred thirty s. that may actually bring us out and that's my great hope so we really need to hope that we are finally at a point where we understand the. the solutions that have been applied thus far have not worked. in japan the average height for men is

he's an associate director at the group martin thank you for being with us so do we need a lot more keynes keynesianism keynesianism to fix the global economy on the back of what the i.m.f. has recently said. firstly i would say the i.m.f. doesn't really have much credibility so i wouldn't be here whatever they say actually attests to waste of time just like the same as watching obama and romney feel they would learn anything new as a truth or was really happening they certainly wouldn't tell you what did i have predicted to personate financial crisis no way and they wouldn't tell you if there was a new one so don't rely on that but basically in our view so too there's an age when enterprises well it was never fixed not anywhere nearly to just a bit of weight or plastered over by putting government money at the problem and now as you have pointed out you know as a government that in all of the major western countries and in japan as well is extremely high and we think there isn't any solution now at this stage because the day is already out of control whether you know you try cutting to re

the future of the economy suppression of interest rates taking the craziest idea the john maynard keynes had of pushing interest rates to zero so now you get people who've been savers and investors all their lives they were tired and you know they were able to earn a quarter or a quarter percent on their money so it's just as. an atrocity it's entirely a creation of the federal reserve is not a natural situation probably people ought to be getting sixteen seventeen eighteen percent of the money. if we if we actually took good if we didn't have the federal reserve holding down interest rates so this hurts every single saver hurts the future of the economy both of these guys represent the fed and the big banks there's no essential difference between them on these issues and so they talk about something else though they have nothing to say about the middle class although they've both backed practices that actively hurt every taxpayer whether they're middle class or poor people or a rich people who are not connected to the government they're all hurt by the by the government and again the pe