German Hyperinflation 1921-23

The hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic was a three-year period of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic (modern-day Germany) between June 1921 and January 1924.

Background

In order to pay the large costs of the First World War, Germany suspended the convertibility of its currency into gold when that war broke out. Unlike France, which imposed its first income tax to pay for the war, the German Kaiser and Parliament decided without opposition to fund the war entirely by borrowing, a decision criticized by financial experts like Hjalmar Schacht even before hyperinflation broke out. The result was that the exchange rate of the Mark against the US dollar fell steadily throughout the war from 4.2 to 8.91 Marks per dollar. The Treaty of Versailles further accelerated the decline in the value of the Mark, so that by the end of 1919 more than 6.7 paper Marks were required to buy one US dollar.

German currency was relatively stable at about 90 Marks per US Dollar during the first half of 1921. Because the Western theatre warfare was mostly in France and Belgium, Germany had come out of the war with most of its industrial power intact, a healthy economy, and in a better position to become the dominant force on the European continent. However the “London ultimatum" in May 1921 demanded reparations in gold or foreign currency to be paid in annual installments of 2,000,000,000 (2 billion) goldmarks plus 26 percent of the value of Germany's exports.

The first payment was made when due in June 1921. That was the beginning of an increasingly rapid devaluation of the Mark which fell to less than one third of a cent by November 1921 (approx. 330 Marks per US Dollar). The total reparations demanded was 132,000,000,000 (132 billion) gold marks, of which Germany only had to pay 50 billion marks (a sum less than what they had offered to pay).

Because reparations were required to be repaid in hard currency and not the rapidly depreciating Papiermark, one strategy Germany employed was the mass printing of bank notes to buy foreign currency which was in turn used to pay reparations. This greatly exacerbated the inflation rates of the paper mark.

Hyperinflation

Beginning in August 1921, Germany began to purchase foreign currency with Marks at any price, but that only increased the speed at which the Mark declined in value. The lower the Mark sank on foreign exchanges, the more marks were required to buy the foreign currency demanded by the Reparations Commission.

During the first half of 1922, the Mark stabilized at about 320 Marks per Dollar. This was accompanied by international reparations conferences, including one in June 1922 organized by U.S. investment banker J.P. Morgan, Jr.  When these meetings produced no workable solution, the inflation changed to hyperinflation and the Mark fell to 800 Marks per Dollar by December 1922. The cost-of-living index was 41 in June 1922 and 685 in December, a 15-fold increase.

In January 1923 French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, the industrial region of Germany in the Ruhr valley to ensure that the reparations were paid in goods, such as coal from the Ruhr and other industrial zones of Germany. Because the Mark was practically worthless, it became impossible for Germany to buy foreign exchange or gold using paper Marks. Instead, reparations were paid in goods. Inflation was exacerbated when workers in the Ruhr went on a general strike, and the German government printed more money in order to continue paying them for "passively resisting."

By November 1923, the American dollar was worth 4,210,500,000,000 German marks.

As a result of hyperinflation, there were news accounts of individuals in Germany suffering from a compulsion called zero stroke, a condition where the person has a "desire to write endless rows of [zeros] and engage in computations more involved than the most difficult problems in logarithms."

Stabilization

When a new currency, the Rentenmark, replaced the worthless Reichsbank marks on November 16, 1923 and 12 zeros were cut from prices, prices in the new currency remained stable. The German people regarded this stable currency as a miracle because they had heard such claims of stability before with the Notgeld (emergency money) that rapidly devalued as an additional source of inflation. The usual explanation was that the Rentenmarks were issued in a fixed amount and were backed by hard assets such as agricultural land and industrial assets, but what happened was more complex than that, as summarized in the following description.

In August 1923, Karl Helfferich proposed a plan to issue a new currency (Roggenmark) backed by mortgage bonds indexed to market prices (in paper Marks) of rye grain. His plan was rejected because of the greatly fluctuating price of rye in paper Marks. The Agriculture Minister Hans Luther proposed a different plan which substituted gold for rye and a new currency, the Rentenmark, backed by bonds indexed to market prices (in paper Marks) of gold.

The gold bonds were defined at the rate of 2790 gold Marks per kilogram of gold, which was the same definition as the pre-war goldmarks. The rentenmarks were not redeemable in gold, but were only indexed to the gold bonds. This rentenmark plan was adopted in monetary reform decrees on October 13–15, 1923 that set up a new bank, the Rentenbank controlled by Hans Luther who had become the new Finance Minister.

After November 12, 1923, when Hjalmar Schacht became currency commissioner, the Reichsbank, the old central bank, was not allowed to discount any further government Treasury bills, which meant the corresponding issue of paper marks also ceased.  Discounting of commercial trade bills was allowed and the amount of Rentenmarks expanded, but the issue was strictly controlled to conform to current commercial and government transactions. The new Rentenbank refused credit to the government and to speculators who were not able to borrow Rentenmarks, because Rentenmarks were not legal tender.  When Reichsbank president Rudolf Habenstein died on November 20, 1923, Schacht was appointed president of the Reichsbank. By November 30, 1923, there were 500 million Rentenmarks in circulation, which increased to 1 billion by January 1, 1924, and again to 1.8 billion Rentenmarks by July 1924. Meanwhile, the old paper Marks continued in circulation. The total paper Marks increased to 1.2 sextillion (or 1,200,000,000,000,000,000,000) in July 1924 and continued to fall in value to one third of their conversion value in Rentenmarks.

The monetary law of August 30, 1924 permitted exchange of each old paper 1 trillion Mark note for one new Reichsmark, equivalent in value to one Rentenmark.

Analysis

The hyperinflation episode in the Weimer Republic in the early 1920s was not the first hyperinflation, nor was it the first one in Europe, or even the most extreme—though probably the most famous—instance of inflation in history (the Hungarian pengo and Zim;babwean dollar have both been even more inflated). However, as the most prominent case following the emergence of economics as a scholarly discipline, the Weimar hyperinflation drew interest in a way that previous instances had not. Many of the dramatic and unusual economic behaviors now associated with hyperinflation were first documented systematically in Germany: order-of-magnitude increases in prices and interest rates, redenomination of the currency, consumer flight from cash to hard assets, and the rapid expansion of industries that produced those assets. German monetary economics was then highly influenced by Chartalism and the German Historical School and this conditioned the way the hyperinflation was then usually analyzed.

John Maynard Keynes described the situation in The Economic Consequences of the Peace: "The inflationism of the currency systems of Europe has proceeded to extraordinary lengths. The various belligerent Governments, unable, or too timid or too short-sighted to secure from loans or taxes the resources they required, have printed notes for the balance."

It was during this period of hyperinflation that French and British economic experts began to claim that Germany destroyed its economy with the purpose of avoiding reparations, but both governments had conflicting views on how to handle the situation. The French declared that Germany should keep paying reparations, while Britain sought to grant a moratorium that would allow for its financial reconstruction.

Reparations accounted for about one third of the German deficit from 1920 to 1923, and were therefore cited by the German government as one of the main causes of hyperinflation. Other causes cited included bankers and speculators (particularly foreign). The inflation reached its peak by November 1923, but ended when a new currency (the Rentenmark) was introduced. In order to make way for the new currency, banks "turned the marks over to junk dealers by the ton" to be recycled as paper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic