IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-23606-0_6.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Speculation

In: John Maynard Keynes

Author

Listed:
  • Piero V. Mini

Abstract

The years of World War I saw the beginning of another activity of Keynes, one that contributed greatly to his maturing into an unclassical economist. We refer to his speculations in the stock, foreign exchange and commodity markets. In this chapter we shall look into this aspect of Keynes’s life relating it to his evolving general philosophy and economic beliefs. We will conclude that his speculative activities, like his war work, did not harmonise with his Moorean beliefs, the clash leading logically to a neurosis that found release in some beliefs and tools of analysis familiar to readers of The General Theory. To some extent, aspects of that scholarly book, not unlike aspects of The Economic Consequences, owe their origin to the clash between his super—ego (the Society’s values) and his more material, worldly desires. Further, what Keynes learned from the financial markets contributed in weakening his faith in the possibility of ‘mensuration’ and in the whole probabilistic approach of the Treatise on Probability.

Suggested Citation

  • Piero V. Mini, 1994. "Speculation," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: John Maynard Keynes, chapter 5, pages 84-93, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-23606-0_6
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-23606-0_6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-23606-0_6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.