Before his blistering attack on the Treaty of Versailles and the three leaders – Clemenceau, Lloyd-George, and Wilson – he held responsible for it, John Maynard Keynes's reputation as an expert on the arcane subject of the Indian currency, as the author of a philosophical work on probability theory, as an intimate of the Bloomsbury group, and as an effective and tireless civil servant at the Treasury was confined to a narrow circle of public officials and intellectuals. But so extraordinary was the impact of The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919/1971) on American and European public opinion that from then on, Keynes could count on a large and attentive audience for almost anything he wrote. And after the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s seemed to confirm his warning that the Treaty of Versailles had imposed an unbearable burden on Germany, Keynes's reputation as an economic savant grew larger still.