Wealth & Money Quote by John Maynard Keynes

Money matters here less as a pile of stuff than as a time machine. Keynes is stripping currency of its moral baggage and treating it as infrastructure: the device that lets today’s effort, restraint, and risk translate into tomorrow’s security and possibility. That’s the specific intent. He’s not praising greed; he’s pointing at money’s real superpower in a modern economy - coordination across time. Without a reliable link between present and future, “saving” becomes hoarding, investment becomes gambling, and planning collapses into improvisation.

The subtext is classic Keynesian: the future is uncertain, and people behave accordingly. We don’t just save because we’re virtuous; we save because we’re anxious. Money is liquid, portable, and socially recognized, so it becomes the preferred shelter when confidence breaks. That’s why the line quietly doubles as a warning. If the link between present and future is frayed - by inflation, deflation, banking crises, or mass unemployment - money stops functioning as promise and starts functioning as panic. People cling to cash, postpone spending, and the economy spirals, not because resources vanished but because trust did.

Context matters: Keynes wrote in the shadow of World War I, the gold standard’s dysfunctions, and the Great Depression, when “sound money” rhetoric often meant sacrificing jobs to defend an abstract monetary ideal. His point cuts through that piety. If money is a bridge to the future, then policy’s job is to keep the bridge standing - stabilizing expectations, safeguarding employment, and making investment feel less like a leap into fog.