• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

WAR NEWS AND EXCHANGE RATES DURING WORLD WAR I: THE EASTERN FRONT VERSUS THE WESTERN FRONT∗ Pablo Duarte, Marcel Freidinger and Andreas Hoffmanny April 8, 2016 Abstract Using a newly compiled dataset on prisoners of war and on soldiers killed and wounded on the Eastern and Western Fronts of World War I, this paper shows that changes in the exchange rates among the currencies of the belligerent countries were associated with good or bad news from the battlefield. Prospects of losing the war depreciated a country's currency. The paper provides evidence that exchange rate fluctuations were less associated with news from the Eastern Front than with news from the Western Front. However, foreign exchange traders took into account information on casualties from the Eastern Front in the early war years. Keywords: Exchange Rates, News, World War I. JEL: F31, N14, N44. ∗We thank George Hall for friendly email correspondence on his paper as well as for sharing his dataset with us. We thank Philipp R¨oßlerfor excellent research assistance and stimulating discussions on the evolution of World War I. We further thank Jan M¨ollerand Jorge Perez for helpful comments and suggestions. yLeipzig University; Institute for Economic Policy; Grimmaische Str. 12; 04109 { Leipzig; Germany; Email: ahoff[email protected] 1 1 Introduction The link between war news and exchange rates has attracted the interest of researchers since at least the time of the American Civil War. As early as 1866, Edward Pollard suggested that the value of the \grayback", the currency of the Confederacy, depended on news from the battlefield (Pollard 1886, p. 415). Similarly, in 1903 Wesley Mitchell argued that the volatility of the greenback's value reflected military news rather than changes in the money supply. Every military victory was found to have led to an increase in the value of the currency and every defeat was found to have led to its depreciation (Mitchell 1903, p. 203).1 There are good reasons to believe that exchange rates among the currencies of the countries fighting in World War I were also affected by news from the battlefield. The world was on a gold standard until the war started in 1914. To finance World War I, however, all countries announced a temporary suspension of the gold standard. They issued short-term debt and issued notes with the promise of paying back war bonds and restoring gold convertibility at the old parities after the war. The value of a country's currency with respect to other currencies, therefore, hinged on the ability of the country to return to the prewar gold parities. It was, however, more likely that the winning party would be able to honor its wartime debt and return to gold parity as the losing side was about to face high reparation claims and to struggle generating the necessary primary surpluses. Therefore, news from the battlefield may have affected exchange rates if that news was used to predict which side was winning. In \The Pity of War" Niall Ferguson (1998, pp. 367-372) suggested that the 1Mitchell (1903, p. 188) further wrote that fluctuations \were so much more rapid and violent than the changes in the volume of circulating medium that not even academic economists could regard the quantity theory as an adequate explanation of the phenomena". Further Mitchell (1908, p. 15) suggested that monthly gold premium fluctuations coincided with war events. In a similar vein, Schwab (1901, p. 169) found that the \value of the `greenback' was much more a barometer of popular feeling as to the eventual outcome of the war than a gauge of their amount in circulation, (...)." However, Lerner (1955, p. 24) maintained that an increase in money supply remained to be the main driver of the Greenback's devaluation during the American Civil War. When it comes to more recent research, e.g., Mauro et. al. (2007, pp. 86-107) demonstrated that war or violence news affected bond yields in emerging markets during the first era of globalization from 1870 to 1913. 2 outcome of World War I did not depend on which side was able to kill more of the other side's soldiers.2 Instead, Ferguson (1998, pp. 386-7) saw in the higher numbers of war prisoners, or of soldiers surrendering, the lost morale of the German troops. The war was won on the Western Front. Building on Ferguson's elaborations, Hall (2004) provides the first empirical evidence that exchange rates fluctuations during the First World War may be explained by the number of soldiers captured on the Western Front. He finds that having more of its soldiers captured indeed led to a depreciation of a country's currency, suggesting that war prisoners were indeed considered to depress the morale of troops or to signal imminent military defeat. Hall further finds that a country's currency appreciated if the number of that country's killed and wounded soldiers was high. Given the peculiarities of trench warfare on the Western Front, he suggested that information on such casualties was interpreted as indicative of which side was taking the offensive to gain land and position. We revisit the link between casualties and exchange rates between belligerents' currencies during World War I with a focus on its second major battlefield { the Eastern Front. Although the victories of the Entente and its allies (most importantly the US) on the Western Front have finally decided the outcome of World War I, the fact that the Western Front is considered more important today does not imply that this was also the perception of traders a hundred years ago. For instance, Adams (2015) documents that structural breaks in French bond prices during World War I reflect war events which are not necessarily considered of extraordinary importance from an ex-post perspective. The trench war on the Western Front and the famous battles of Verdun and the Somme are more prominently featured in historical accounts (e.g. Jankowski 2013, p. 12), in documentaries and in the collective postwar memories. But historians have continued to emphasize the importance of the two-front war and the long \Forgotten"3 Eastern Front in understanding the complex evolution of the First 2In fact, German soldiers caused relatively higher casualties, when considering the whole war period and it took Germany only a third of financing to do. Nevertheless, Germany lost the war (Ferguson 1998, pp. 336-337). 3See Groß (2009). 3 World War. Germany aimed at preventing a two-front war. However, Russia was able to mobilize its troops earlier than expected. Therefore, the Eastern Front was particularly interesting in the beginning of the war. When the Schlieffen plan failed, the results on one front affected the results on the other. For instance, in October 1914 the Central Powers transferred troops from the Western to the Eastern Front to fight against Russian forces in East Prussia (e.g. Mommsen 2004, pp. 40-55, Stone 1998, p. 48). We shall compare the evolution of the importance of casualties from the two fronts in explaining exchange rates during the war. Hall's interpretation of the effects of casualties on exchange rates during World War I relied heavily upon the pecularities of trench warfare in the West. The Eastern Front was very different. In the very diverse war of maneuver soldiers captured may signal which side was winning, not necessarily be an indicator of the fighting morale of the troops. For instance E. Juenger's writings reveal the impact of differences in warfare on soldier's fighting morale, suggesting that only in the trench war, soldiers spent a miserable time that undermined their morale.4 In fact, when it comes the the East, e.g., Russian propaganda used the number of war prisoners as motivation for the troops to keep on fighting. More importantly, higher numbers of soldiers killed and wounded should not be viewed favorably as they cannot be an indicator of which side was on the offensive. To examine if and how casualties from the Eastern Front affected exchange rates, this paper presents new data on prisoners of war as well as soldiers killed and wounded in action for the main belligerents on the Eastern Front: Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. We compiled this data by going through the German Imperial Archive's (1926-1944) multi-volume documentation \Der Weltkrieg 1914 4\Nach kurzem Aufenthalt beim Regiment hatten wir fast alle Illusionen verloren, mit denen wir ausgezogen waren. Statt der erhofften Gefahren hatten wir Schmutz, Arbeit und schlaflose Nchte vorgefunden, zu deren Bezwingung ein uns wenig liegendes Heldentum gehrte. Diese dauernde beranstrengung war Schuld der Fhrung, die den Geist des neuartigen Stellungskrieges noch nicht erfat hatte. In einem kurzen, draufgngerischen Kriege kann und mu der Offizier die Mannschaft rcksichtslos erschpfen, in einem sich lang hinschleppenden fhrt dies zu physischem und moralischem Zusammenbruch. Die ungeheure Postenzahl und die ununterbrochene Schanzarbeit war zum grten Teil unntig und sogar schdlich. Nicht auf gewaltige Verschanzungen kommt es an, sondern auf den Mut und die Frische der Leute, die dahinterstehen. 'Eiserne Herzen auf hlzernen Schiffen gewinnen die Schlachten."' (Juenger, 1922, p. 8). 4 bis 1918 - Die milit¨arischen Operationen zu Lande" and the Austrian War Office’s anthology \Osterreich-Ungarns¨ letzter Krieg 1914 - 1918." Merging our data with Hall's (2004) data for the Western Front, we constructed a rich new dataset of casualties on both fronts. Using our new dataset we show that military news from the \Forgotten" Front, too, seems to help in explaining the fluctuations in exchange rates between the currencies of the Entente and Central Powers. In particular, we find that a higher number of soldiers taken prisoner, suggesting the side was losing the war, led to a depreciation of that country's currency.

Load more

  36

Copy Link