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In the last few years Keynes's investment activity, both as an individual trader and as a manager of institutions’ portfolios, has attracted attention in the specialised literature. Recently his investments on Wall Street, in particular – both on his own account (Cristiano, Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo 2018) and on behalf of King's College, Cambridge (Chambers and Kabiri 2016) – have been analysed, and the evident connection with his theoretical analysis of the functioning of the financial markets contained in chapter 12 of The General Theory has been duly stressed. This article aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of Keynes's trading behaviour on Wall Street by providing a detailed comparison of his investment choices when he traded for himself and for King's. There are similarities, as might be expected, but also significant differences, well worth investigating. As far as the differences are concerned, one of the most striking is to be seen, for instance, in his attitude when, after a period of bull market in 1936, he had to face the spring 1937 burst of the speculative bubble and subsequent recession. Analysis of his behaviour in this specific case reveals that the event took him by surprise but his reaction differed with regard to his personal investments and the King's investments. The prevalence of a ‘buy and hold’ strategy, which, according to Chambers and Kabiri's reconstruction (2016), marked Keynes's behaviour in general (and also in this particular case) when he invested on behalf of King's, was not always his typical choice when the investments were undertaken on his own account. A tentative explanation of this result, which is also grounded on some different features characterising the two portfolios and not sufficiently investigated in previous studies, is at last provided in the article.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, options began to be widely employed in the main financial centres in Europe and the USA for trading in spot and futures markets. From 1921 onward, Keynes embarked upon investment in these derivatives mainly—but not exclusively—in the commodity markets, showing a true fascination for this method of speculation. This type of financial investment he pursued mainly in the 1920s, with only a few operations undertaken during the 1930s. The option markets in which Keynes traded were metals—in particular copper, lead, spelter and, especially, tin. Besides metals, Keynes dealt in options also in other commodity markets, such as rubber and linseed oil, and sparingly in ordinary stocks and government securities. In this paper we offer a reconstruction of Keynes's speculative activity in commodity options, drawing on the archival material kept in the Keynes Papers held at King's College, Cambridge. This reconstruction is, to the best of our knowledge, entirely new to the literature and aims to provide an analysis of this particular aspect of Keynes's investment behaviour, investigating his capacity to predict market trends and offering a preliminary assessment of his performance.

The present article contributes to the strand of recent literature devoted to reconstruction of John Maynard Keynes's operations in commodity markets, currencies and stock exchange markets. Specifically, our work offers, for the first time, a comprehensive account of Keynes's personal dealings in wheat futures in the market places of Winnipeg, Chicago and Liverpool in the years from 1925 to 1935. Our reconstruction of Keynes's trading activity benefits from archival research at King's College (Cambridge, UK) where the Keynes Papers are kept. Moreover, in order to form a full picture of the markets in which Keynes was operating we reconstructed the historical series of spot and future prices. The result marks an advance in thorough examination of Keynes's speculative style in a complex international environment, as was the wheat futures market in the interwar period. One of the main findings of the article is the fact that Keynes adopted a completely different strategy when operating on the North-American markets in the 1920s from the approach he followed trading on the Liverpool market in the 1930s. In the former case he tried to anticipate reversal in the price trend, aiming at 'beating the market' and acting prevalently as a short-term investor. In the latter, he followed a long-term roll-over strategy (that is, with renewal of long positions) more consistent with his own theoretical representation of the speculator as a «risk-bearer» (Keynes 1923). Our reconstruction of Keynes's operations in the wheat futures markets constitute further confirmation of the view — shared in the literature (Chambers and Dimson 2013, Marcuzzo and Sanfilippo 2016) — that a change occurred in Keynes's speculative style (both in stocks and in commodities) around the beginning of the 1930s, when he abandoned a short-term type investment behaviour in favour of a long-term investor perspective.

This paper has two main goals. The first is to show that behavioral rather than maximizing principles emerge from textual analysis as the microeconomic foundations for Keynes's Consumption Theory; the second goal is to demonstrate that it is possible to ground a Keynesian-type aggregate Consumption function on the basis of (some of) the principles underlying contemporary behavioral models

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health has not been clarified yet, with multiple studies warranting a special focus on women and young adults. A sample of 101 Italian women recruited from the general population was evaluated a few weeks before the onset of the pandemic and during the first and the second wave of the pandemic. Depression values at the Brief Symptom Inventory showed an initial increase followed by a stabilization on higher values in respect to the baseline, whereas Phobic Anxiety was stably worsened. Participants with insecure attachment styles and childhood trauma showed higher levels of distress at all timepoints. In many psychopathological domains, moderation analysis showed an unfavorable trend over time for younger participants. The present study seems to confirm a high burden on mental health for women during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting young age, insecure attachment style, and childhood trauma as negative prognostic factors.

Background The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused over 530 million infections to date (June 2022), with a high percentage of intensive care unit (ICU) admissions. In this context, relatives have been restricted from visiting their loved ones admitted to hospital. This situation has led to an inevitable separation between patients and their families. Video communication could reduce the negative effects of such phenomenon, but the impact of this strategy on levels of anxiety, depression, and PTSD disorder in caregivers is not well-known. Methods We conducted a prospective study (6 October 2020–18 February 2022) at the Policlinico University Hospital in Catania, including caregivers of both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 ICU patients admitted during the second wave of the pandemic. Video-calls were implemented twice a week. Assessment of anxiety, depression, and PTSD was performed at 1-week distance (before the first, T1, and before the third, video-call, T2) using the following validated questionnaires: Impact of Event Scale (Revised IES-R), Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Results Twenty caregivers of 17 patients completed the study (T1 + T2). Eleven patients survived ( n  = 9/11 in the COVID-19 and n  = 2/6 in the “non-COVID” group). The average results of the questionnaires completed by caregivers between T1 and T2 showed no significant difference in terms of CES-D ( T1  = 19.6 ± 10, T2  = 22 ± 9.6; p  = 0.17), HADS depression ( T1  = 9.5 ± 1.6, T2  = 9 ± 3.9; p  = 0.59), HADS anxiety ( T1  = 8.7 ± 2.4, T2  = 8.4 ± 3.8; p  = 0.67), and IES-R ( T1  = 20.9 ± 10.8, T2  = 23.1 ± 12; p  = 0.19). Similar nonsignificant results were observed in the two subgroups of caregivers (COVID-19 and “non-COVID”). However, at T1 and T2, caregivers of “non-COVID” patients had higher scores of CES-D ( p  = 0.01 and p  = 0.04, respectively) and IES-R ( p  = 0.049 and p  = 0.02, respectively), while HADS depression was higher only at T2 ( p  = 0.02). At T1, caregivers of non-survivors had higher scores of CES-D (27.6 ± 10.6 vs 15.3 ± 6.7, p  = 0.005) and IES-R (27.7 ± 10.0 vs 17.2 ± 9.6, p  = 0.03). We also found a significant increase in CES-D at T2 in ICU-survivors ( p  = 0.04). Conclusions Our preliminary results showed that a video-call implementation strategy between caregivers and patients admitted to the ICU is feasible. However, this strategy did not show an improvement in terms of the risk of depression, anxiety, and PTSD among caregivers. Our pilot study remains exploratory and limited to a small sample.