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. 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. 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.
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.
ISBN-13: 9781586489946
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Publication Date: 10-12-2010
Pages: 288
Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)
Table of Contents
Note to the 2010 edition vii
Prologue ix
1 Gold for Iron 1
2 Joyless Streets 17
3 The Bill Presented 27
4 Delirium of Milliards 39
5 The Slide to Hyperinglation 61
6 Summer of'22 80
7 The Hapsburg Inheritance 92
8 Autumn Paper-chase 108
9 Ruhrkampf 129
10 Summer of'23 158
11 Havenstein 170
12 The Bottom of the Abyss 186
13 Schacht 205
14 Unemployment Breaks Out 218
15 The Wounds are Bared 233
Epilogue 248
Acknowledgments 257
Bibliography 259
Index 261
