when money dies the nightmare of the weimar collapse

Yet to survey the great array of literature of all kinds - economic, military, social, historic, political and biographical - which deals with the fortunes of the defeated Central Powers after the First World War is to discover one particular shortage. When a nation's money is no longer a source of security, and when inflation has become the concern of an entire people, it is natural to turn for information and guidance to the history of other societies who have already undergone this most tragic and upsetting of human experiences. What if it does not? Germany in 1923 provides a vivid, compelling, sobering moral tale. 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. However, “quantitative easing,” that modern euphemism for surreptitious deficit financing in an electronic era, can no less become an assault on monetary discipline. Germany’s finances descended into chaos, with severe social unrest in its wake.Money may no longer be physically printed and distributed in the voluminous quantities of 1923. People watched helplessly as their life savings disappeared and their loved ones starved. 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.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.

When money dies the nightmare of the weimar collapse