Germany, 1923
Stories about the rigors of life in Germany are plentiful. Economic disaster ensued when the Allied Reparation Commission required Germany to pay a whopping 132 billion gold marks in reparations for World War 1 — Janet Klug, Linn’s Stamp News, 25 February 2008.
Whopping? 132 billion gold marks sounds like a lot, but so does 132 billion Turkish “old” Lira. This is an example of the type of information searches philately spurs:
What’s was the buying power of 132 billion gold marks in 1921? A thousand homes? The Louvre? All of Liechtenstein?
Let’s start with a Google search for germany inflation 1923 wikipedia and look at the first match:
The total reparations demanded was 132,000,000,000 gold marks which was far more than the total German gold or foreign exchange. An attempt was made by Germany to buy foreign exchange, but that was paid in treasury bills and commercial debts for Marks which only increased the speed of devaluation.
Um, OK. You bill the country more than its entire net worth? Had no idea. Yikes. The article also states:
The German currency was relatively stable at about 60 Marks per US Dollar during the first half of 1921.
Have I mentioned I love Google? People were talking about the “Information Age” decades ago, but Google has gotta define it. Anyway, a search for dollar historical buying power in Google, and, again, the first match: Historical Currency Conversions. A little division, and we put “2 billion 200 million” into the form, and choose “dollars” (yes, you can spell out your amounts like that.) The answer: 4.7 x 1018 (4.7E18) dollars in today’s buying power!
This post will be useful for students, so I will avoid profanity at this moment. But, man! That’s almost 5 sextillion dollars! The U.S. GDP (thanks, Google!) was 13 trillion in 2006. That’s 350,000 years’ worth of the U.S. economy!
Someone please tell me I made a decimal point error somewhere, or that the people at Historical Currency Conversions are full of it. Sextillions of dollars?
Forget Liechtenstein! There’s not a continent you couldn’t buy for that kind of money!
What were “we” thinking? Did we really think this wouldn’t trigger another, worse war?
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6 Responses to “Germany, 1923”
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March 3rd, 2008 at 16h27
The point, I think, was to utterly destroy the German economy and leave the nation completely destitute. Which, when you look at the next decade or so, is precisely what happened. Apparently, the notion of “hard war, soft peace” hadn’t really taken hold at that point. Oops.
There’s a delicate art to kicking a dog hard enough that it stays down but not so hard that it doesn’t go crazy and maul you. German dogs, it turns out, don’t take well to being kicked.
March 3rd, 2008 at 16h32
Wow, I really messed up the HTML in that post. Sorry about that.
Should be fixed now.
November 8th, 2008 at 00h57
“Someone please tell me I made a decimal point error somewhere, or that the people at Historical Currency Conversions are full of it.”
Well, since you asked, I’ll tell you did make an error of sorts. I’m “the people at Historical Currency Conversions”, and if you entered “2 billion 200 million” in the form, it *multiplied* 2 billion *times* 200 million, and then did the conversion. This is because the language is powered by my programming language “Frink” which treats that as an implicit multiplication, like the implicit multiplication if you say “3 dozen” or “4 trillion.”
So, if you had just entered into the form:
132 billion / 60
and converted that from 1921 dollars to current dollars, you’d get the more reasonable 26 billion dollars as a result. The Kaiser still owes me money!
“Now my story begins in 19-dickety-two. We had to say ‘dickety’ cause the Kaiser had stolen our word ‘twenty’. I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles.” — Grandpa Simpson
Hope this helps!
November 8th, 2008 at 10h50
Well, yes, that helps quite a bit.
Thank you.
June 20th, 2009 at 00h11
I Love the way you write…thanks for posting
June 20th, 2009 at 00h23
I Love the way you write…thanks for posting
I’m always tempted in “I can haz spam?” situations like this to delete the spammy URL and leave the compliment.
Actually — I think I will do exactly that.