Ernst Guicking’s spendthrift side was a natural response to years of suppressed demand in which Germans had saved because there was relatively little to buy. When Germany went to war, 20 per cent of economic production was allocated to armament and this had rapidly increased to over a third of GDP. Suppressed domestic demand led to high rates of savings. Through regulatory controls these private savings accounts were themselves silently redeployed by the government to finance the war effort, thus avoiding a repeat of the public appeals to buy war bonds which had been such a feature of the
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