Economists call this the “Keynesian era,” since it was a time in which John Maynard Keynes’ economic theories, which already formed the basis of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States, were adopted by industrial democracies pretty much everywhere. With them came Keynes’ rather casual attitude toward money. The reader will recall that Keynes fully accepted that banks do, indeed, create money “out of thin air,” and that for this reason, there was no intrinsic reason that government policy should not encourage this during economic downturns as a way of stimulating demand—a position that had
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