Sachs liked to quote Keynes’s warning that “there is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction.”5 He shared Keynes’s view that it was the sacred duty of economists to suppress those forces of destruction at all costs. “The thing I got from Keynes,” Sachs says, “was this deep sadness and sense of risk that things can go completely awry. And how incredibly stupid it was of us to leave Germany in a state of disrepair.”
