Handre@Handre
In 1919, John Maynard Keynes walked out of the Paris Peace Conference in disgust and wrote *The Economic Consequences of the Peace*. You do not have to admire the man's later work to admire this book. He was right. Everyone who mattered ignored him.
The Treaty of Versailles saddled Germany with reparations eventually fixed at 132 billion gold marks in 1921. Keynes did the arithmetic. Germany could not pay. A nation stripped of the Saar coalfields, of Alsace-Lorraine, of its merchant fleet, of 13 percent of its territory, then ordered to run massive trade surpluses to ship gold westward. The math never closed.
So Germany did what indebted governments always do when politicians refuse the honest cost. It printed. The Reichsbank ran the presses, and by November 1923 a single dollar cost 4.2 trillion marks. Workers collected wages twice a day and spent them within the hour. Savers who trusted the mark watched a lifetime of thrift evaporate.
You cannot vote a bankrupt debtor into solvency, and you cannot inflate your way out of an obligation without robbing your own people first. This is what the Versailles negotiators never grasped. Clemenceau wanted vengeance; he got Weimar.
Keynes predicted the whole sequence. The politicians preferred the applause of angry crowds. You know how that story ends.
