* diplomats finding themselves lucky enough to have one US dollar treating six of their friends to riotous parties at numerous clubs and hotels over the course of a weekend and still leaving with an inordinate amount of change
* thieves stealing suitcases of marks and immediately dumping the contents to run away with the empty suitcases (which were worth more than the money they contained) Such a radical inflation led to some strange events, including. His narrative suffers from an over-reliance upon the historical perspective described by Toynbee: "One damn thing after another."Ĭonsider the mid-war inflation of the mark: it went from being around 1 Gold Mark= 1 Paper DM to 1 Gold Mark= 1 TRILLION Paper DM within a scant four years. Money may no longer be physically printed and distributed in the voluminous quantities of 1923. However, “quantitative easing,” that modern euphemism for surreptitious deficit financing in an electronic era, can no less become an assault on monetary discipline. Whatever the reason for a country’s deficit necessity or profligacy, unwillingness to tax or blindness to expenditure it is beguiling to suppose that if the day of reckoning is postponed economic recovery will come in time to prevent higher unemployment or deeper recession. What if it does not? Germany in 1923 provides a vivid, compelling, sobering moral tale.Īdam Fergusson has taken one of the more dramatic episodes in economic history and rendered it sterile and devoid of life. People watched helplessly as their life savings disappeared and their loved ones starved. Germany’s finances descended into chaos, with severe social unrest in its wake. In 1923, with its currency effectively worthless (the exchange rate in December of that year was one dollar to 4,200,000,000,000 marks), the German republic was all but reduced to a barter economy. Expensive cigars, artworks, and jewels were routinely exchanged for staples such as bread a cinema ticket could be bought for a lump of coal and a bottle of paraffin for a silk shirt.
When Money Dies is the classic history of what happens when a nation’s currency depreciates beyond recovery.
0 kommentar(er)
