![]() Hitler was still in the wings but the combination of revolutionary threat, industrial unrest, unemployment, starvation, deprivation and occasional assassination made monetary discipline almost impossible, even had the fragile new republican government had the courage to impose it. The Weimar hyperinflation owed as much to ignorance of the quantitative theory of money as to Germany’s being a defeated country ruined by war and subject to unpayable reparations and expropriations. For these quasi-Leninist propositions, Germany of the early 1920s provided a preposterous object lesson. ![]() And little so distresses and disrupts a society as loss of trust in its national currency or of confidence in those who issue or corrupt it. Nothing makes ordinary people question the nature of money so much as high inflation. But then the Times had already suggested back in 1975 that the prime minister put a copy by every bed at Chequers. Recent sales of the book were certainly helped by press reports in 2010 that a businessman from Holland had sent a copy to every member of the Dutch parliament: Warren Buffett, he said, had commended it to him. ![]() A woman uses banknotes to light a stove in Berlin c.1922. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |