Keynes's personal investments in the London Stock Exchange and his views on the transformation of the British economy

In this paper we analyse Keynes’s personal investments in the London Stock Exchange, focusing on Keynes’s selection and pattern of choices of assets, rather than performance of the portfolio. Among other things, this approach may help to assess Keynes’s evaluation of the British economy which was undergoing relevant structural changes in the interwar period. An assessment based on Keynes’s trading behaviour and investment philosophy is a relevant addition to what we know from his public statements or the positions he took in the political arena and even more so given that no detailed reconstruction of his personal investments in the London Stock Exchange had been attempted hitherto. His declared investment philosophy, his choice of sectors and individual shares seem all to indicate his perception of both the structural changes in British economy and the decline in competitiveness of British industry.