Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Money is no more than a medium of exchange. Only when it has a value
acknowledged by more than one person can it be so used. The more general
the acknowledgement, the more useful it is. Once no one acknowledged it,
the Germans learnt, their paper money had no value or use - save for papering
walls or making darts. The discovery which shattered their society was that
the traditional repository of purchasing power had disappeared, and that there
was no means left of measuring the worth of anything. For many, life became
an obsessional search for Sachverte, things of ‘real’, constant value: Stinnes
bought his factories, mines, newspapers. The meanest railway worker bought
gewgaws. For most, degree of necessity became the sole criterion of value,
the basis of everything from barter to behaviour. Man’s values became
animal values. Contrary to any philosophic assumption, it was not a salutary
experience.

What is precious is that which sustains life. When life is secure, society
acknowledges the value of luxuries, those objects, materials, services or
enjoyments, civilised or merely extravagant, without which life can proceed
perfectly well but which make it much pleasanter notwithstanding. When life
is insecure, or conditions are harsh, values change. Without warmth, without
a roof, without adequate clothes, it may be difficult to sustain life for more
than a few weeks. Without food, life can be shorter still. At the top of the
scale, the most valuable commodities are perhaps water and, most precious of
all, air, in whose absence life will last only a matter of minutes. For the
destitute in Germany and Austria whose money had no exchange value left
existence came very near these metaphysical conceptions. It had been so in
the war. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Müller died ‘and bequeathed me
his boots - the same that he once inherited from Kemmerick. I wear them, for
they fit me quite well. After me Tjaden will get them: I have promised them
to him.’

In war, boots; in flight, a place in a boat or a seat on a lorry may be the
most vital thing in the world, more desirable than untold millions. In
hyperinflation, a kilo of potatoes was worth, to some, more than the family
silver; a side of pork more than the grand piano. A prostitute in the family
was better than an infant corpse; theft was preferable to starvation; warmth
was finer than honour, clothing more essential than democracy, food more
needed than freedom.

Much as it may have been recognised that stability would have to be
arranged some day, and that the greater the delay the harder it would be, there
never seemed to be a good time to invite trouble of that order. Day by day
through 1920, 1921 and 1922 the reckoning was postponed, the more (not the
less) readily as the prospective consequences of inflation became more
frightening. The conflicting objectives of avoiding unemployment and
avoiding insolvency ceased at last to conflict when Germany had both.
The longer the delay, the more savage the cure. Austria by the end of 1922
was in the hands of the receivers, having regained a stable currency only
under the absolute direction of a foreigner. Hungary, too, had passed any
chance of self-redemption, and later on was to undergo an equal degree of
hardship and suffering, especially for her public servants. Stability returned
to Germany under a military dictatorship when much of the constitution had
been suspended - although the State of Emergency was only indirectly
necessitated by the destruction of the nation’s finances. To all three countries
stability and then recovery came. All had to be bailed out by others. Each was
obliged to accept a greater degree of economic disruption and unemployment
than need ever have been feared at the time when the excessive printing of
banknotes might still have been stopped. In all three cases, after inflation
reached a certain advanced stage, financial and economic disaster seems to
have been a prerequisite of recovery.

What really broke Germany was the constant taking of the soft political
option in respect of money. The take-off point therefore was not a financial
but a moral one; and the political excuse was despicable, for no imaginable
political circumstances could have been more unsuited to the imposition of a
new financial order than those pertaining in November 1923, when inflation
was no longer an option. The Rentenmark was itself hardly more than an
expedient then, and could scarcely have been introduced successfully had not
the mark lost its entire meaning. Stability came only when the abyss had been
plumbed, when the credible mark could fall no more, when everything that
four years of financial cowardice, wrong-headedness and mismanagement
had been fashioned to avoid had in fact taken place, when the inconceivable
had ineluctably arrived.

When war came back, so did inflation. With inflation alone, noted Günter
Schmölders,55 can a government extinguish debt without repayment, or wage
war and engage in other non-productive activities on a large scale: it is still
not recognised as a tax by the tax-payer. Thus did Hitler resume deficit
spending to finance armaments in 1938, and the experience begin again. As
in the first case, the second inflation was a ten-year affair, although huge
price inflation did not start in earnest until the eighth and ninth years, when
cigarettes took over as the medium of exchange.

In terms of public perception, however, the second inflation travelled much
faster. By 1948 the Reichsmark was abandoned, and ten Reichsmarks were
traded in in cash against the new Deutschmark, while bank accounts were
credited with only 6.50 Deutschmarks for every 100 Reichsmarks. Disaster
had struck the holders of money values once again, but the agony was
contained very much more quickly. The pass to which the Reichsmark had
come in 1947-1948, the loss of nine-tenths of its value, had been achieved by
its predecessor, the mark, as early as 1919.

Her new war indemnities apart, Germany was once again an almost debtfree
country; and once again, with stability regained, great foreign loans were
available to haul her out of her economic difficulties. Once again the
repudiation of debt, conscious or unconscious, had been shown to be no more
than a stage on the hyper-inflationary road. In the Toronto Star Weekly in
December 1923, Ernest Hemingway described a street auction of inflation
banknotes - German marks, Austrian kronen, Russian roubles - which the
citizens of Toronto were being urged to buy in the hope, of which Germans,
Austrians and Russians had long since been brutally robbed, that when sanity
returned the banknotes, too, would retrieve their old values:

No one explained to the listening men that the cheap-looking Russian money
had been printed in million-rouble denominations as fast as the presses could
work in order to wipe out the value of the old imperial money and in
consequence the money-holding class. Now the Soviet has issued roubles
backed by gold.

How great does inflation have to be before a government can no longer
control it? Most economists accept that mild inflation has certain therapeutic
advantages for a nation which must deal with the social and economic
problems to which industrial democracies are usually subject. Most
electorates still accept the statements of their politicians’ pious intentions in
regard to controlling ever rising prices: and yet the Deutschmark, the
currency of the country which had most reason to fear inflation, lost twothirds
of its purchasing power between 1948 and 1975. The pound lost almost
half its purchasing power between 1970 and 1975. In neither instance,
however, did such depreciation represent a deliberate, cynical policy; which,
no doubt, would also have been claimed by the German bankers and
governments of the early 1920s, who looked for causes of their monetary
difficulties beyond their own printing press and tax system - and found them,
without difficulty and to their complete intellectual satisfaction. It remains so
that once an inflation is well under way (as Schmölders has it) ‘it develops a
powerful lobby that has no interest in rational arguments’. This was as true
for Austria and Hungary as for Germany.

Our Mafioso Economy

Extortion is the keystone of America's Mafioso Economy.

And scene: here are the dons, each the ruthless head of their own vast organization, seated next to their wives in a show of bourgeois respectability, assembled by invitation to kiss the ring of the Godfather. This isn't just fiction, of course; we've all seen the photo of America's Big Tech dons, wives in tow, lined up in a display of billionaire obeisance.

We all know the drill: give the Godfather respect and his cut, and you can return to your extractive monopoly confident that nobody is going to interrupt your grift.

Welcome to America's Mafioso Economy, where monopolies are free to extract vast fortunes via addiction (pharmaceuticals, social media, gaming, pornography, gambling, entertainment, etc.), predatory pricing (oops, I mean dynamic pricing), shoddy goods and services, shakedowns, and of course, extortion: offers you can't refuse.

For example, that software you could buy and use for years until the Mafioso Monopoly obsoleted it? Now you have to rent it. It's called a subscription service, which is like calling the addict's next hit of smack a subscription service. You have a need, and the Mafioso Monopoly will service your need, but monthly. So what once cost $200 now extracts $1,000 from your earnings. Same product (or worse), but now it costs a lot more.

That's America's Mafioso Economy in a nutshell: same product or service, but now it costs more. And since the Mafioso Monopolies bought up all their competitors (an offer you can't refuse), there's no where else to turn, except perhaps another Mafioso member of a cartel.

It's not just pay to play--you have to pay just to enter the auction of political favors. The Clinton Foundation set a new standard of Mafioso malignancy: "donate" to the foundation if you want access, then "donate" more if you want some actual action.

Extortion is the keystone of America's Mafioso Economy. Apply a little pressure, make an offer they can't refuse, and voila. Nice little business / institution you got there, too bad it's about to be gutted by some new regulations or executive actions. There is a way to make it all go away, but it's going to cost you.

Extortion pricing is Corporate America's playbook. Since every corporation Mafia deploys the same algos and extractive exploitation strategies, our choice boils down to which paddock we enter to get sheared.

Our Stasi-style surveillance and AI-powered algos have detected you can pay more than your fellow debt-serfs, so the price of your airline seat, or grocery item, is higher than the other customers. It's not extortion because you could go to another member of the Mafia cartel, but alas, they use the same dynamic pricing, so too bad you passed up that initial price, now it's even higher.

Junk fees abound because we have no choice. Where else can you buy a ticket to that concert you absolutely must attend? How about switching electrical utilities to get a better deal? Monopolies abound because they're the foundation of America's Mafioso Economy.

Darth Vader understood the Empire is also a Mafioso structure. Once you gain power over supply and governance, then you're free to alter the deal at will. I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further.

Robert Fosbury, an astrophysicist with an interest in the effect of light on biology, contends that “We made a huge unconscious mistake when we decided to change the lighting in the built environment.” In his collaborations with scientists in diverse disciplines, Fosbury reports, “What we’ve realized increasingly is that the removal of non-visible light from indoor lighting has been a catastrophe of the first order.”

Fosbury likens what he views as “infrared starvation” caused by indoor environments devoid of infrared wavelengths to scurvy, a disease caused by a vital missing nutrient. In this case, the nutrient is infrared light.

“We believe this is one of the main contributors to the gradual peaking and decline in public health that we’ve noticed over in the last decade or so,” he explains. “The increase in type 2 diabetes and obesity, in all the diseases of aging, and many of these things can be attributed to mitochondrial dysfunction.”

Jeffery notes that the effects of limiting one’s exposure to this narrow range of light build up over time. “All the damaging things that come from blue light come from longer term blue light exposure,” he says. “If I want to undermine your mitochondria with blue light, I have to expose them for quite a long time consistently.”

In November, a year after the Armistice, Frau Eisenmenger wrote that her
position was alarmingly worse, the financial situation beyond her
understanding. The krone, at 25 Swiss centimes the previous Christmas, was
now quoted at one-twelfth of a centime. Her shares, however, were going up.
Gambling on the stock exchange had become the fashion - the only way to
avoid losing all one’s money and perhaps to add to it. Many new bankers
were giving people advice, the flight from the krone governing all
transactions. ‘Meanwhile,’ Frau Eisenmenger wrote,

the large numbers of unemployed, their passions fermented by the
Communists, are seething with discontent … a mob has attempted to set the
Parliament building on fire. Mounted policemen were torn from their horses,
which were slaughtered in the Ringstrasse and the warm bleeding flesh
dragged away by the crowd … the rioters clamoured for bread and work …
Side by side with unprecedented want among the bulk of the population,
there is a striking display of luxury among those who are benefitting from the
inflation. New nightclubs are being opened. These clubs have the further
effect of greatly intensifying the class hatred of the proletariate against the
bourgeoisie.

October 1922, however, was the nadir for shareholders. From then on not
only did money find its way back into shares, but people who could obtain
cheap credit, or were unable to send their money abroad, began to realise the
advantages of buying up their own country’s industrial and other assets at a
fraction of their true value. Although in real terms the stock market began to
go up, the mark’s purchasing power continued to go down.

‘By the end of the year,’ said Erna von Pustau,
my allowance and all the money I earned were not worth one cup of coffee.
You could go to the baker in the morning and buy two rolls for 20 marks; but
go there in the afternoon and the same two rolls were 25 marks. The baker
didn’t know how it happened … His customers didn’t know … It had
somehow to do with the dollar, somehow to do with the stock exchange - and

As the old virtues of thrift, honesty and hard work lost their appeal,
everybody was out to get rich quickly, especially as speculation in currency
or shares could palpably yield far greater rewards than labour. While the
anonymous, mindless Republic in the shape of the Reichsbank was prepared
to be the dupe of borrowers, no industrialist, businessman or merchant would
have wished to let the opportunities for enrichment slip by while others were
making hay.

For the less astute, it was incentive enough, and arguably
morally defensible, to play the markets and take every advantage of the
unworkable fiscal system merely to maintain one’s financial and social
position.

As that position slid away, patriotism, social obligations and morals slid
away with it. The ethic cracked. Willingness to break the rules reflected the
common attitude. Not to be able to hold on to what one had, or what one had
saved, little as it worried those who had nothing, was a very real basis of the
human despair from which jealousy, fear and outrage were not far removed.
The air of corruption in business, politics, and the public service, then, was
general. The share capital abuses that became common as more and more
shares were concentrated in the hands of profiteers were no more than an
example, although a serious one, of the moral deterioration caused by
inflation - they largely disappeared when stable money was restored.

In an article in the New York World written in the summer of 1923, Stresemann
rather defensively suggested that ‘our whole business life has acquired the
character of dishonesty and corruption because the value of the mark in June
does not happen to be the same as the value in July’. More privately he
admitted that the substance and the shadow of improbity were the same.

The new danger was that when the peasants finally refused to deliver produce to the towns, the towns would go and fetch it. It had happened in Austria during the blockade. It had happened in the Ruhr and the Rhineland under the provocation of French militarism and enforced idleness. Now there were reports from Saxony - unoccupied Germany - that bands of several hundred townspeople at a time had taken to riding out into the countryside on bicycles to confiscate what they needed.

Anna Eisenmenger’s diary included a first-hand account of the plunder of Linz and its neighbourhood in Austria - the place which Hitler regarded as his home town. She transcribed a letter from her daughter who had been staying there for a few weeks with cousins who ran a small farm with eight cows, two horses, twelve pigs and the usual poultry:

I had driven with Uncle and Aunt to church at Linz. The nearer we approached the more crowded became the usually deserted high road. All kinds of odd-looking individuals met us. One man wearing three hats, one set on top of the other, and at least two coats, excited our amusement ... We met people drawing carts piled high with tinned foods of every description ... A man and a woman were seated in a ditch by the side of the road and, without the least embarrassment, were changing their very ragged garments for quite new ones. ‘Hurry up,’ the woman shouted to us, ‘or there’!l be nothing left!’ We did not understand this remark until we passed the first plundered shops.

Peaceful Linz looked as if it had been visited by an earthquake. Furniture smashed beyond recognition littered the pavements. But not only provision shops, inns, cafés, and drapers’ shops had been looted. Jewellers and watchmakers, too, had been unable to defend their wares. We saw that the inn at which Uncle and Aunt usually stopped after Mass was completely devastated. The old innkeeper caught sight of us and hurried up, almost in tears. He could not open his inn because all the furniture had been smashed and all the provisions stolen; and he strongly advised my uncle to drive home, since the ringleaders of the mob were inciting their followers to ransack the neighbourhood ...

My uncle urged on the horse ... In the lane which winds to my uncle’s farm ... we noticed a troop of about 80 or 100 men and and women. They were bawling and singing and driving in their midst a cart harnessed with a brown horse. Uncle exclaimed: ‘They’re driving away Hansl and our cart!’ Without another word he leapt to the ground, but could only advance slowly with his stiff leg across the field towards the road where he meant to intercept the troop.

A lorry load of gendarmes turned up at that moment. A few shots were fired, and the mob dispersed into the hills, the horse and cart left behind.

In the cart I saw three slaughtered pigs. In addition, some pieces of slaughtered cows and pigs and a few dead hens were lying in an untidy heap. ‘My God, my God,’ wailed my aunt. ‘What will things be like at home?’ ... Two gendarmes accompanied us in order to ascertain the damage. ‘If only they didn’t always destroy everything,’ said one of them. ‘As for their being hungry, that’s not surprising.’ We were prepared for the worst. The gates of the farmyard were wide open. There was not a sign of the servant girls. A pig seriously injured but still living was lying in its own blood in the yard. The other pigs had run out into the road. The cow-shed was drenched in blood. One cow had been slaughtered where it stood and the meat torn from its bones. The monsters had slit up the udder of the finest milch cow, so that she had to be put out of her misery immediately. In the granary the store of grain and fodder were in a state of wild confusion ... a rag soaked with petrol was still smouldering to show what these beasts had intended. In the kitchen-living room of which my aunt was so proud not a thing had been left whole. Uncle estimates the damage at 100,000 peace kronen, and no insurance company will pay him any compensation for his loss.

The towns were starving. The countryside had had a bumper harvest, but there it remained because of the farmers’ steadfast refusal to take paper for it at any price. Something had to be done to shift it. On September 18 were published the plans for the new Boden Credit Bank, later to be known as the Rentenbank, a bank of issue backed not by gold (it was too late for that) but by mortgages on both agricultural land and industry. It was fundamentally an expedient to induce the farmers to co-operate in feeding the nation: and the Bodenmark was by way of a solid form of Kontomark - the units of account worth ten cents each which the Reichsbank was now using to express the real values of current accounts: at last the old fiction of Mark gleich Mark had been formally abandoned.