Zach Carter on the Real Story of Weimar Hyperinflation
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2021
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Whenever the government is engaging in fiscal or monetary expansion, people like to invoke the history of Weimar Germany and how soon we might all go around transporting dollars in wheelbarrows. But what really happened with Weimar and how did it come about? On this episode, we speak with Zach Carter, the author of the best-selling book “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.” He explains how the story of collapse of the German currency was less about money printing and more about domestic political collapse and the destruction of the country's productive base.
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| 0:30.0 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the Adlots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal, |
| 1:00.4 | and I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, you know, it's interesting having watched the aftermath |
| 1:05.8 | of two separate crises now because you start to see similarities in the sort of stories that people |
| 1:12.4 | tell after each one of them. Yeah, that's true. I also think it's really interesting to see how |
| 1:19.2 | much opinions kind of change in retrospect. So I remember for instance, after the 2008 financial |
| 1:26.0 | crisis, people would get upset if you suggested that quantitative easing could have an impact on |
| 1:32.1 | stocks. Like if you actually said there was an asset substitution effect, people would think |
| 1:37.0 | that you were crazy. I remember writing an alpha-vill post on this at the time and getting a bunch |
| 1:41.8 | of comments saying it was completely wrong. And now of course, the idea that QE pushes up stocks, |
| 1:48.0 | you know, most people sort of accept that even if it may or may not be true. But yeah, you're right. |
| 1:54.9 | You were really ahead of the curve back then. Thank you. I'm just humble bragging. |
| 1:58.4 | Like talking about asset substitution effects, but I also think like the dominant narrative |
| 2:05.2 | like out there just in the sphere of the broad things is all this idea of like QE would |
| 2:10.8 | inevitably lead to inflation. Yeah. Maybe even hyperinflation, all this government spending, |
| 2:16.2 | and obviously we saw a lot of talk about that in 2010, and we see a lot of talk about it now, |
| 2:22.8 | just this idea that government policy, particularly US government policy is reckless and we're going |
| 2:28.4 | to destroy the value of the dollar. Yeah. And to offset what I just said about that alpha-vill post, |
| 2:34.3 | I'm pretty sure I also wrote things on alpha-vill about the coming hyperinflation, or at least I |
| 2:39.4 | summarized a bunch of notes about that, you know, back in 2008, 2009. But you're right. That was sort |
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