When Money Dies Quotes

“Inflation did not conjure up Hitler, any more than he, as it happened, conjured it. But it made Hitler possible. It is daring to say that without it Hitler would have achieved nothing: but so is it daring to assert that, had enormous post-war unemployment not been held at bay for years by financing the government’s deficits and by an ungoverned credit policy, bloody revolution would have occurred, leading presumably to an equally bloody civil war whose outcome can only be guessed at. In all these matters, it was anyway touch and go.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money Dies: The Nightmare of Deficit Spending, Devaluation, and Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany

“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.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies

“In both countries rapid inflation caused homegrown produce to be withheld from the urban markets, with hunger and anger the inevitable result.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies

“were ostentatious about it, they were hated even more. It may have been stupid of them, and of course the wiser Jews, especially the older ones, were greatly upset, and remonstrated with the younger, because they foresaw the antagonism their behaviour would create. The Jews probably paid fair prices for what they bought - but that wasn’t the point. Except for my father and many of his generation, people hated the Jews. My father realised that the fault did not lie with the Jews but somehow much higher up. Of course, it would be wrong to give the impression that there were not many impoverished Jews in Budapest and other places who had got things just as wrong as everybody else. Compared with elsewhere, the elite branches of the Hungarian civil service - the Army, the diplomatic corps, and the financial administration - usually maintained the old traditions of integrity; and they suffered for that. The families of senior civil servants who tried to stick to the ethics of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy often met disaster - unless they had land with which to support their convictions - and the attitudes of such parents were often resented by the young who found the maintenance of uncomfortable principles objectionable while their friends’ families were obviously making compromises. Real corruption was found less in the central government than at county level. This was something entirely new. When my father protested about the irregularities that were permitted - the keeping of two sets of books, the acceptance of bribes, the payments in cash, the extra jobs taken on which left less time for official work to be done - the reply was: ‘Your Excellency, will you feed my children?’ There was communal hatred, which was new. There was social resentment, which was new. There was bribery and corruption: that was new. It was the same in Austria and Poland. If you get the same fever, you get the same symptoms.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies

“My relations and friends were too stupid. They didn’t understand what inflation meant. They didn’t rush to get rid of their money (that was what the Jews and the Germans did). All my relations thought it would stop the next week - and they went on thinking so. They woke up very late. They started selling their valuables because they couldn’t buy food - the china from the mantelpiece, the furniture, the silver. That made them think - it made them think when the price of a set of old silver spoons went up from 20,000 to 40,000 crowns in a matter of a week or two. And if you had to sell a valuable writing desk for money which was worth only half as much a week later, of course there was ill-feeling. It was resented when Jews bought these things. The Jewish women would turn up at parties or at thé dansants when we were all broke, wearing the silver fox furs - three at a time for ostentation - and diamonds which they had bought from our relations for a song - or what, when they saw them again, had become a song. My relations didn’t know the value of anything. They were stupid. Our solicitors were no better. My mother’s bank manager gave her appalling advice - he didn’t know what he was talking about either. Anti-Semitism had been negligible before inflation. Although Bela Kun’s revolution had been mainly run by Jews, the White Terror had largely purged political resentment. The Jews had been badly treated in Hungary since the 1860s, and were not received socially for many years. Nine out of ten bore grudges, and when the opportunity of impressing the arrogant gentiles arrived at last, who was to blame them for taking it? When they made a success of inflation, they were hated. When they”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies

“As the clamour grew, with support from the Courts,49 against the iniquities which inflation had caused, the government attempted to redress what grievances it could. By the decree of February 14, 1924, known as the Third Taxation Ordinance (one of more than 70 ordinances issued during the period of the Enabling Act), industrial debentures and mortgages were revalued at 15 per cent of their original gold price. Mortgage bonds, savings bank deposits and other obligations were revalued at slightly higher rates. Meagre as these terms may have been, they meant nothing to people who had been obliged to part with their securities or whose credits had been paid off in paper earlier on. A further law of July 1925 therefore introduced a retrospective element to cover extinct mortgages and debentures which had been held in good faith since at least five years before, and raised the rate of mortgage revaluation to 25 per cent.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies

“In the countryside the landowners and farmers were less affected than anyone, producing most of their own essentials and putting up commodity prices as regularly as the shopkeepers. Landless peasants were not doing so well, and the large number of casual labourers whose wanderings had been limited by the new confines of Hungary formed a particularly destitute class. Hohler’s account concluded with the comment that many were thriving in the economic crisis and were responsible for the superficial atmosphere of prosperity which Budapest presented - notably, he thought, the Jews who made up much of the capital’s population.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies

“By contrast, the peasantry (two-thirds of the population) on the whole viewed it all with indifference as they were always able to sell their produce at something close to the world market price: possibly they were better off than any similar body in Europe.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies

“The Chancellor would accept no connection between printing money and its depreciation. Indeed, it remained largely unrecognised in Cabinet, bank, parliament or press. The Vossische Zeitung of August 16 declared that the opinion that the flood of paper is the real origin of the depreciation is not only wrong but dangerously wrong … Both private and public statistics have long shown that for the last two years the interior depreciation of the mark is due to the depreciation of the rate of exchange … It should be remembered today that our paper circulation, although it shows on paper a terrifying array of milliards, is really not excessively high … We have no ‘dangerous flood of paper’ but, on the contrary, our total circulation is at least three or four times as small as in peace time. Lord D’Abernon described these remarkable views as ‘far from exceptionally retrograde’, and in fact typical of enlightened Berlin opinion. The Berliner Börsen Courier a couple of days later showed greater concern for the social consequences but no more awareness about the reasons. It regretted that the German mark at one-three-hundredth of its par value was now in the same class as the Hungarian korona. The proletariate was becoming restless, said the newspaper, and the State whose taxation estimates were based on an average exchange rate of 500 to the dollar was helpless.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies

“Our first purchase was from a fruit stand … We picked out five very good looking apples and gave the old woman a 50-mark note. She gave us back 38 marks in change. A very nice looking, white bearded old gentleman saw us buy the apples and raised his hat. ‘Pardon me, sir,’ he said, rather timidly, in German, ‘how much were the apples?’ I counted the change and told him 12 marks. He smiled and shook his head. ‘I can’t pay it. It is too much.’ He went up the street walking very much as white bearded old gentlemen of the old regime walk in all countries, but he had looked very longingly at the apples. I wish I had offered him some. Twelve marks, on that day, amounted to a little under 2 cents. The old man, whose life savings were probably, as most of the non-profiteer classes are, invested in German pre-war and war bonds, could not afford a 12 mark expenditure. He is the type of the people whose incomes do not increase with the falling purchasing value of the mark and the krone.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies

“Mr Seeds wrote from Munich to say that his chauffeur’s weekly expenditure on food was now 5½ times as great as it had been a year ago, in August 1921. On the other hand, his wages were nearly six times higher. Since these were fixed according to the average rate paid to his class of worker, he was not suffering unduly except in so far as wage rises, a monthly occurrence by this time, always lagged a little behind price rises which took place weekly, if not daily. This was the case for the vast mass of artisans and workmen, but of course, Seeds said, the middle class, including officials and journalists, were far from being in the same satisfactory position. It was from this latter group, he pointed out, that foreigners mostly derived their information, which was why the accounts of the incidence of inflation published abroad were almost unrelievedly gloomy.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies

“that if you wish to destroy a nation you must first corrupt its currency. Thus must sound money be the first bastion of a society’s defence.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies

“The question to be asked - the danger to be recognised - is how inflation, however caused, affects a nation: its government, its people, its officials, and its society. The more materialist that society, possibly, the more cruelly it hurts.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies

“Garbo’s role may lack persuasion today; but from the odious butcher insulting and taunting the food queues at his shop, refusing meat to women he found unattractive or unwilling, to the scenes of the unlicensed, gluttonous revelry of the nightlife of the speculator and profiteer, and to the ultimate attack by a starving, angry crowd on a café full of merrymakers - the film was a faithful reflection of the times.”
― Adam Fergusson, When Money dies