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Money was originally a mean to measure exchange.
Economists and bankers made money to be the ultimate goal, and this is why we have this crisis.
If you remove the ability of money to be exchanged by goods, world economy becomes a virtual online game played on the bank servers.
Dedicating your life to money would be addiction to videogames.
Forbes measures who has more money, the highest score in Pacman.
In 1922-1923 Germany suffered hyperinflation. Money does not even have an intrinsic value by itself, as the experience showed there. It was the aberrant game of economics, causing social chaos. And economists officially still wonder what happened, but off the record they know it was a time of easy credit, just like the bubble we have now.. Quote:
In the early 1920s Germany experienced one of the most severe inflations of all time. The inflation was not apparent in 1920, but began showing up in 1921. Thereafter it got steadily worse until it came to an abrupt halt at the end of 1923. At its worst in the second half of 1923, prices rose more than fivefold each week.
Some idea of the magnitude of this catastrophe can be seen in table below. During 1920 and early in 1921 the signs of inflation were mixed. The price of food was increasing, but the price of dollars in terms of marks (the mark was the name of the German currency) was dropping, and so were the prices of products bought from the United States. However, the signs of inflation were unmistakable in the next year, from mid 1921 to mid 1922. In this period prices increased about sixfold--that is, it took six marks at the end of the period to buy what one mark would have bought at the beginning. But this rapid inflation, greater than any yearly inflation in the history of the United States, was only a prelude for what was to happen.
From the middle of 1922 until the middle of 1923, prices increased by over 100 times. Measured by the price of food, prices were 135 times higher at the end of the period than they were at the beginning. Measured by how many marks it took to buy a dollar, prices were 222 times higher. Yet even this horrid inflation was mild compared to what happened from July to November of 1923, when prices increased by somewhere between a million and a billion times their previous level.
The rapid increase in German inflation can be seen in the postage stamps that were issued during this period. (See the picture below.) In 1920 the highest valued stamp issued was for four marks. In 1923 the denominations were changing so rapidly that the post office could not design new stamps fast enough and resorted to using old dies and then overprinting them with new values. The highest value reached in 1923 was for 50 billion (50,000,000,000) marks. A great many of these stamps must have been issued and bought, though not necessarily used, because very few of the almost 200 varieties of stamps issued from 1921 to 1923 have more than minimal collector's value. Also, stamps that were postally used during the period have a higher collector's value than stamps that were never used, a pattern that is quite unusual.
Inflation hurts some people but helps others by redistributing wealth and income. Buyers, for example, are hurt by higher prices, but offsetting this is the gain that the producers get from the higher prices. People on fixed incomes will suffer, as will creditors, who are owed fixed amounts of money in the future. On the other hand, those making fixed payments, such as most debtors, will benefit. The German hyperinflation illustrates the redistribution that inflation causes in a dramatic way. It eliminated the value of all life insurance policies and all savings left in banks. When life insurance policies were paid in 1923, the value of the check was usually worth much less than the stamp used to post the letter. The hyperinflation eliminated all debts that existed prior to 1921. For example, the value of German mortgages in 1913 measured in U.S. dollars was about $10 billion; in late 1923 these mortgages were worth only one U.S. penny.
By 1924 the inflation had radically redistributed the wealth of Germany. The segment of society that was hit the hardest seems to have been the middle class. The poor had little wealth to lose while the rich were often able to get their wealth into forms not adversely affected by inflation. Wealth held in foreign bank accounts, gold and precious metals, and land maintained value.
If redistribution were the only effect of inflation, one could argue that it is not a serious problem. Since for every loser there is a winner, society as a whole may break even (if this redistribution is not seen as being too "unfair"). However, inflation also makes ordinary decisions more difficult to make, and it causes people to change their behavior. The changes in behavior, which cause social losses, are again dramatically illustrated in a hyperinflation.
Coping with a situation in which prices could double in a day meant changes in the way people organized their financial affairs. Wages were paid daily or several times a day, and the whole family would immediately go out and spend the money before it lost value. In The Black Obelisk, a novel set in 1923, Erich Maria Remarque describes this practice:
"Workmen are given their pay twice a day now--in the morning and in the afternoon, with a recess of a half-hour each time so that they can rush out and buy things--for if they waited a few hours the value of their money would drop so far that their children would not get half enough food to feel satisfied."2
Getting rid of money was the key to financial survival since it lost its value so quickly.
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09-21-2009, 03:22 PM
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