When Money Dies, a 1975 cautionary tale from the Weimar Republic

Remember the three day week, miners strikes and the glories of fixing British Leyland cars, where every motor was a Friday afternoon job? No, you probably don’t because you weren’t born then To be honest I was a kid then so I didn’t really understand the horror.

This was after the 1973 oil shock, and there was this thing called inflation stalking through the land. A chap called Adam Fergusson looked back in time, to 1930′s Germany, to garner information about inflation, and this book encapsulated what he found.

Though the stage had been set for the inflation by the conditions set at Versailles, the story has curious resonances with now. In the initial stages, the inflation took the form of a slow-motion economic train wreck, which is similar to now in terms of the middle classes slowly being destroyed by their purchasing power dropping. Some people who either have non-financial capital, particularly businesses connected abroad, do quite well, and foreigners do particularly well as their hard currency is highly sought after.

Now of course the German experience was far worse that anything we have experienced in recent times, and has had a deep effect on the German psyche, with a low tolerance of debt and a low tolerance of Club Med profligacy at the moment. This book is a powerful cautionary tale of what may lie ahead if we don’t get a grip on inflation.

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