26 September 2012

Quantitative Easing Did Not Work For The Weimar Republic Either

Did printing vast quantities of money work for the Weimar Republic?  Nope.  And it won't work for us either.  If printing money was the secret to economic success, we could just print up a trillion dollars for every American and be done with it.  The truth is that making everyone in America a trillionaire would not mean that we would all suddenly be wealthy.  There would be the same amount of "real wealth" in our economy as before.  But what it would do is render our currency meaningless and totally destroy faith in our financial system.  Sadly, we have not learned the lessons that history has tried to teach us.  Back in April 1919, it took 12 German marks to get 1 U.S. dollar.  By December 1923, it took approximately 4 trillion German marks to get 1 U.S. dollar.  So was the Weimar Republic better off after all of the "quantitative easing" that they did or worse off?  Of course they were worse off.  They destroyed their currency and wrecked all confidence in their financial system.  There was an old joke that if you left a wheelbarrow full of money sitting around in the Weimar Republic that thieves would take the wheelbarrow and they would leave the money behind.  Will things eventually get that bad in the United States someday?

More: http://shiftfrequency.com/quantitative-easing-did-not-work-for-the-weimar-republic-either/

Pretty much every effort to increase productivity by debasing a currency by central banks and governments throughout history has failed. The roman empire dilute it's Denarius, cutting it with other metals until no one would accept them. The Denarius went down to nearly 0.4% by the time the empire collapsed. The Weimar republic was no different, they simply debased paper money that already had no value. Then there was Zimbabwe, who ended up with 20,000,000 dollar notes through hyperinflation by the end of their run. Why would anyone believe that the same thing can't happen in the United States?

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