A closer look
Most economists just write intensely boring papers about interest rates, but John Maynard Keynes liked to wildly shop his way out of problems. During World War I, the British art market absolutely plummeted. Fearing the loss of highly significant cultural assets to wealthy foreign buyers, Keynes convinced the British Treasury to literally just give him thousands of pounds to aggressively scoop up masterpieces by Cézanne and Degas. He successfully bailed out the art world and netted the country a massive fortune in the process.
