African American Reparations, Keynes, and the Transfer Problem

Abstract

The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) was Keynes’s unsuccessful (long) essay in persuasion to convince the Allies not to impose what he perceived as an excessive reparations burden on Germany after World War I. In (long) hindsight, one can wonder if Keynes was inordinately prescient. Did he glimpse that the burden of postwar reparations would put Germany on the road to national socialism and a mission of global conquest that would lead to World War II?