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  • When Money Dies

  • The Nightmare of Deficit Spending, Devaluation, and Hyperinflation in Weimar, Germany
  • By: Adam Fergusson
  • Narrated by: Antony Ferguson
  • Length: 9 hrs
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (35 ratings)

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When Money Dies

By: Adam Fergusson
Narrated by: Antony Ferguson
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Publisher's Summary

When Money Dies is the classic history of what happens when a nation's currency depreciates beyond recovery. In 1923, with its currency effectively worthless (the exchange rate in December of that year was one dollar to 4,200,000,000,000 marks), the German republic was all but reduced to a barter economy.

Expensive cigars, artworks, and jewels were routinely exchanged for staples such as bread; a cinema ticket could be bought for a lump of coal; and a bottle of paraffin for a silk shirt. People watched helplessly as their life savings disappeared and their loved ones starved. Germany's finances descended into chaos, with severe social unrest in its wake.

Money may no longer be physically printed and distributed in the voluminous quantities of 1923. However, quantitative easing, that modern euphemism for surreptitious deficit financing in an electronic era, can no less become an assault on monetary discipline. Whatever the reason for a country's deficit - necessity or profligacy, unwillingness to tax, or blindness to expenditure - it is beguiling to suppose that if the day of reckoning is postponed economic recovery will come in time to prevent higher unemployment or deeper recession. What if it does not? Germany in 1923 provides a vivid, compelling, sobering moral tale.

©2010 Adam Fergusson (P)2010 Audible, Inc.
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

Critic Reviews

“Engrossing and sobering.” ( Daily Express, London)
“One of the most blood chilling economics books I’ve ever read.” (Allen Mattich, The Wall Street Journal)

What listeners say about When Money Dies

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    5 out of 5 stars

A must read for any student of economics

A must read for any student of economics. I had studied the interwar period of Germany with academic curiosity, but this book made the human tragedy behind all those numbers so very real.

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This sbook is meant to be READ only..

What disappointed you about When Money Dies?

Horrible book to listen to, all accounting really - Audible should be a bit more careful when transferring these books into audible book... Can certainly not recommend this style of book for this purpose

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