Of course it is easy to reel off loads of enormous numbers to show just how unreal economics had got, but there are also plenty of spotlights on how this all affected ordinary people, and I found people's optimism that things couldn't get any worse particularly striking, since things certainly did get worse. This book gives what I think is a very good narrative of the years after WWI when Germany, Austria and Hungary suffered that very fate - to one degree or another - and why things were allowed to go so wrong. Lets face it - we all rely on money these days, and what might happen if it becomes worthless is a nightmare few would be prepared to contemplate. What if it does not? Germany in 1923 provides a vivid, compelling, sobering moral tale.Įntertaining and sometimes scarey real-life story 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.

When money dies by adam fergusson