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Keynes’s ‘Open Letter’ to Roosevelt in 1933, sounded, writes Herbert Stein, ‘like the letter from a school teacher to the very rich father of a very dull pupil’. In Savannah, in March 1946, for the inaugural meeting of the International Monetary Fund, Keynes made a speech in which he hoped that ‘there is no malicious fairy, no Carabosse’ who had not been invited to the party. The reference was to Tchaikovsky’s ballet, Sleeping Beauty, but Frederic Vinson the US Secretary of the Treasury, took it personally. ‘I don’t mind being called malicious, but I do mind being called a fairy,’ he growled.
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