If you are in money management, you make predictions. This is the life we lead. We get new facts and have to change views. Admitting that new facts should change opinions is core to learning.
The Keynes quote should always be in the back of your mind when making investment decisions even if Keynes never said it. There are many great Keynes quotes but this is not one of them. Reading about how often this quote has been wrongly attributed to Keynes is a great story. There is no reference to it, nor can any of his great biographers recall him saying it. See Quote Investigator, a useful source of information that supports this story.
Some attribute the quote to Winston Churchill. The closest quote to possible fact was a comment by Joan Robinson who knew Keynes well and attributes the following to him, "When someone persuades me that I am wrong, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Keynes was a excellent debater and was known to adjust his opinions to win the argument. He also was a fluid thinker who changed views as information changed. One notorious story says that Churchill sent Keynes a cable reading, “Am coming around to your point of view.” Keynes is said to have responded, “Sorry to hear it. Have started to change my mind.”
Paul Samuelson actively used the Keynes quote. He also commented on the changing opinions of Keynes. "One of the jokes is that if Parliament asked six economists for an opinion on any subject they always got seven answers. Two from John Maynard Keynes. I think when we economists examine the seven answers we find that the discrepancies among them are not as great as the layman thinks."
Regardless of history, it is a good quote to follow. We will just have to stick with the line from John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
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