It is obviously very touchy for an English author since it might point to the unfairness of the Versailles treaty. The subject matter is fascinating and very little covered by history books. 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. Money may no longer be physically printed and distributed in the voluminous quantities of 1923. Germany's finances descended into chaos, with severe social unrest in its wake. People watched helplessly as their life savings disappeared and their loved ones starved.
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.Įxpensive 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.
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