If you want an in-depth look at post-WW1 monetary policy up to WW2, I would recommend <em>Lord of Finance</em> by Liaquat Ahamed. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2010, the book follows the lives of the 4 most prominent central bankers of the time (Benjamin Strong, Governor of NY Fed; Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England; Emile Moreau, Governor of the Banque de France and Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank).
It covers a little from before WW1, the issue of reparations, the German hyperinflation, the bull run of the 1920s, the Great Depression, and how the gold standard impacted all those issues. It also does cover Keynes, and some of his opinions, but not to the extent that you can read the book and understand what Keynesianism is all about.
Yes of course, but a government at war has tools at its disposal to essentially direct economic activity into production of critical resources if it so desires. Lords of Finance (while not a great book overall) actually describes the various approaches in WW1 taken by the participants, from the German strategy of essentially printing money and going for broke, to the French strategy of more austere rationing.
If you can handle all the boring jargon and slow pacing, this book should scare the shit outta you. We're *literally* doing this again by screwing with the money supply to benefit the uber-rich, and driving a bunch of angry poor people towards strongmen with "answers."
At this point, I'd put it in the Horror section at the library.
Great book I highly recommend. It can be dry, but it goes into detail how the USA helped create the situation for WW2 by being major financiers of WW1.
tl;dr USA got all the gold, ruined the gold standard, destroyed German economy and helped give rise to Hitler.
Part finance, part economics, I highly recommend Lords of Finance (https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800). It discusses the actions of several key people and subsequent events in the banking sector leading up to the Great Depression. Largely shaped our world today.
Lords of Finance is an excellent book on this complicated subject. But in short it was a confluence of factors including WW1 debt, German reparations, the gold & silver standards, currency devaluation, and international politics, to name only a few.
Another common but equally false misconception is that the causes of the Great Crash were domestic (to the U.S.). Many of the reasons money was cheap and easy in the U.S. had their roots in European economies and trade.
Wow there is way too much flawed in there... where to start?
Maybe the beginning. There's no proportionality in loses, no agreement of "for every dollar you lose, we lose 0.60). That's an absurd claim. They have more to lose too. The country may get a bail out but it's the IMF that's funding this non sense. The IMF isn't in the same "all in" predicament as greece is. In such, it can lose more (because it has more) without talking bails. Strictly loss.
Next, money paid on the interest of loans isn't money lost. Loans in theory should be only taken when their net benefit, that is, the interest is calculated to be less than the value you are getting from the loan. That's econ 101.
The comparison of Greece and Germany arn't about circumstances of a war, but the similarity is absolutely there. Germany borrowed insane money (like greece has done) to fund infrastructure they didn't need (there's alot of examples of them approaching a bank for a small loan and being convinced to take our 1 for 10x as much). The Germans printed money to service debt and they fought the austerity measures places on them by Europe (I'm sure you learned about the Dawes plan and reparations measures in school, though probably not in depth... I know we only scratched the surface of it). Germany wasn't at all about the destruction of infrastructure...
If you're interested, http://www.amazon.ca/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800 Is a great book.
Better pull that latex off son, you're shooting blanks.
I'm aware of your argument and I don't disagree. I've read Hayek & Friedman etc and I used to buy into their ideology & their modern contemporaries that invoke their name, but as I tried to mesh my own personal experiences, events around me, and becoming more broadly read, I've concluded that there is a more nuanced view. I highly recommend the book Lords of Finance, it's not a economics book, it's really a history book. (Note: it won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize). It allows you to fit economics into the broader fabric of human history.
http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800
Sure, but no quick reads. Here's an award winning book about the economics behind the great depression, drawing ties to the 08-09 crisis, and is filled with history about America, England, France and Germany http://www.amazon.ca/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800
> Yeah we built the wealthiest nation the world had ever seen with a “shit” gold standard
The US economy, prior to the New Deal era, was shit. It always lurched from boom to bust, every several years the economy suffered a meltdown with double-digit unemployment. The 50 years prior to 1930 saw much lower per capita economic growth than the 50 years after.
Look at the list of recessions, or "panics" prior to the New Deal era, how many there were, and how deep they went. The US in the 19th century would have grown and industrialized much faster with a modern macroeconomic and monetary policy framework.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States
> What the hell does gold have to do with the great depression
The general idea is that the US had to keep interest rates high and monetary policy tight because it had to prevent gold from flowing out of the US; this is obviously the exact opposite of what you want to do in a recession/depression. Overall, there's a lot more to this topic, of course. I recommend reading this book, to start with:
https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800
The closest analogue is the gold standard age, from the mid-1800s through 1914 and then, disastrously, in the interwar period. The first part was marked by long depressions and frequent, catastrophic financial panics (think 2008, but with no Fed to pick up the pieces). The second part, from the return to gold in the early 1920s to finally leaving it in the mid-1930s, led more or less directly to the Great Depression, which was largely ended by dumping gold again.
Some useful reading is Ahamed's <em>Lords of Finance</em>, Galbraith's <em>The Great Crash of 1929</em>, and Bruner's <em>The Panic of 1907</em> (in which the US economy was personally saved from oblivion by J.P. Morgan locking a bunch of bankers in his library).
There is a book called "Lords of Finance" by Ahamed Liquiat that you should find quite interesting. . https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800
Independent research. If you rely on the media to form your opinions you are already lost.
Lots of people talk about these things e.g. vdare.com and amren, all the alt-right blogs and sites etc. but you're a racist for looking at those sites obviously.
I'm not a huge fan of the gold standard (it had its day and collapsed as there was not enough new gold mined to meet demand with economic expansion and the US had the vast majority of world gold so noone had anything to trade) but it is probably better than the gangsterism we currently have.
EDIT: Interesting book on gold standard: http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1463343826&sr=8-3&keywords=bretton+woods
> America was not the reason reparations were needed.
Read "Lords of Finance". America does deserve the kind of blame /u/mrv3 mentions. It's mentioned in there.
Wow, the best example of hyperinflation you can invoke is the one from 90 years ago? How about Zimbabwe a decade ago or Venezuela today. But we're not talking about Germany at the dawn of the modern era, or third-world shit holes. Defend against my comments about Japan or any of the other G8 countries that have engaged in stimulus over the last eight years. Hyperinflation is fucking terrible, and far worse than deflation. But hyperinflation over a few hundred or thousand percent per year is very different than managed inflation of 2%, the general target, and is highly unlik. Because 2% deflation is worse than 2% inflation. So again, you don't understand the other side. Your view is that we should return to the gold standard, which would return us to the living standards of our great-great-grandparents. And make a few gold shillers rich. And remember that there is still inflation under the gold standard, determined by the amount of gold produced. Pretty silly to allow your price level to be determined by an industry that is primarily outside Canada.
Edit: By the way, if you want to talk about Weimar, read this first: https://www.amazon.ca/Lords-Finance-Bankers-Broke-World/dp/0143116800
Why do you like the gold stadard? Another book suggestion.