“No-one could anticipate such an ingenious revelation of extreme folly to which ignorance and false theory could lead . . . The Reichbank’s own demented inspirations give stabilization no chance,” wrote the British ambassador, Lord d’Abernon, an expert on state bankruptcies who had thought that he surely had to have witnessed the worst financial excesses in the lunacies of the Egyptian khedives and the Ottoman Turks, only to find them almost Swiss in their rectitude compared to the Germany of 1923.
