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The Crash and its catastrophic consequences, as well as his professional engagement as an economist, inspired him to present that understanding in a coherent form. 4 To Warsaw The economic turmoil that characterised independent Poland, indeed the whole of Europe, in the 1920s was exacerbated by the 1929 Crash. The subsequent depression in the United States devastated those economies that had relied on export-led growth, underpinned by the apparent prosperity of the US economy in the first decade after the First World War, or on foreign direct investment to sustain business investment.

Fiscal policy shifted taxation from profits and land towards rural and urban household income. In the middle of 1929, Kalecki’s first articles appeared in the weekly magazine of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Przemysł i Handel (Trade and Industry). 6 At around the same time as Kalecki’s article on the European coal crisis appeared – the coal crisis being a sharp fall in coal prices in world markets – Kalecki published a similar article, ‘International Coal Competition’, in a journal which had not previously carried his work, Przegląd Polityczny (Political Review).

16 Kalecki’s view contrasted with that in the business press generally and in the financial markets, where it was believed that Kreuger was the victim of market pressures beyond his control. The London Economist reported the financier’s death as ‘the veritably tragic wreck of a career which in its sphere was unsurpassed by that of any individual in living memory . . 17 Even Keynes, who was willing to concede that the operators on the New York Stock Exchange possessed ‘a gangster mentality’,18 saw in Kreuger a ‘tragic’ victim of liquidity preference: ‘.