Business Under German Inflation
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NOVEMBER 2003 Business Under German Inflation by Ludwig von Mises aper money inflation and credit expan- symptoms. Nothing is done to end the root sion never fall upon a people like an act cause, i.e., the increase in the quantity of of God. They are always the outcome money and the expansion of credit. P of a deliberate policy. The governments The truth is that the propensity to inflate and the parties in power take recourse to is nowadays greater than it ever was before. inflation because they consider it as a bless- It is only that the advocates of inflation and ing or at least a minor evil when compared credit expansion have resorted to new termi- with the effects either of cutting down pub- nology. They call the thing expansionism, an lic expenditure or of choosing other methods easy money policy, unbalanced budgets, or of financing. This applies to both peace and functional finance. The British paper which to war. Inflation as such does not contribute inaugurated in 1943 the action which anything to winning battles. It does not pro- resulted in 1944 in the Bretton Woods agree- duce arms and other equipment. It is merely ment explicitly declares that the aim of the one of the methods available for financing new international institution is to bring the huge expenditure caused by war. The about “an expansionist pressure on world other methods are taxation and borrowing trade.” It expects that this expansionist pol- from the public (and not from the commer- icy will perform “the miracle . of turning cial banks). If a government prefers inflation, a stone into bread.” it must not plead as an excuse that there was The idea that monetary and credit expan- no other way left. sion make business good, create “full Of course, the term inflation has fallen employment,” and bring general prosperity into disrepute. All governments and all polit- was the essence of the ideas of Mercantilism. ical parties emphatically announce that their The fallacies implied were utterly exploded main concern is to fight this dreadful thing by the economists whom the Prussian His- called inflation. In fact they are not fighting torical School and their modern followers, inflation, but only its symptoms and neces- Keynesians and the American advocates of sary consequences, namely the rise in prices. unbalanced budgets, disparage as orthodox. And this struggle is doomed to failure pre- A new systematic analysis and thorough cisely because it is merely a tampering with refutation of the defects of the doctrine of expansionism certainly is not needed. Those Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was the foremost interested in such a critical examination are Austrian economist of the twentieth century, an referred to the writings of Professor B. M. adviser to FEE, and the author of Human Action. This is the major part of an article originally pub- Anderson, of the late Professor Edwin Kem- lished in the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, merer,[1] and of many other brilliant Ameri- March 7, 1946. can economists. The goal of this article is 10 A 20,000,000 mark (August 1923) merely to stress an aspect of the problems terdam at 100 guilders, at that time by and involved which is often neglected. It seems large the equivalent of 240 marks. The price expedient to exemplify the issue with the of the stock dropped and the German sold it case of the German inflation of 1914–1923, at 90 guilders. This involved in gold a loss of the classical expansionist experience of our 10 percent. But in the meantime the price of century. the guilder in Berlin had risen from 2.40 to 3 marks; 90 guilders represented now 270 A Mark Is Always a Mark marks. The German capitalist made in marks an apparent gain of 30 marks or 12.5 Among the gravediggers of the German percent. However, the average Germans and people’s prosperity and the German cur- their spokesman Bendixen were not shrewd rency, Friedrich Bendixen occupies an emi- enough to see things in the right light. With nent place. He was a bank manager and the them a mark was still a mark. They smilingly author of many books and articles dealing pocketed an alleged gain. with monetary matters. His prestige and his The same phenomenon presented itself in influence on the course of the Reich’s finan- every branch of international economic rela- cial policy were enormous. tions. The champions of expansionism When in the first World War the mark’s assign to rising foreign exchange rates the purchasing power declined and concomi- power of stimulating export trade. It was tantly foreign exchange rates went up, Ben- this idea that impelled many European coun- dixen trumpeted that this was a rather fortu- tries in the inter-war period to devalue their nate event. For, he said, it made it possible domestic currencies. for the Germans to sell their holdings of for- Such a devaluation at one stroke makes eign securities at a profit. foreign exchange rates rise. But domestic Let us consider an example. A German commodity prices and wage-rates lag for owned on the eve of the war a Dutch secu- some time behind the rise in foreign rity which was traded on the bourse of Ams- exchange rates. In the interval, before the 11 Ideas on Liberty • November 2003 price structure on the domestic market to provide the means for the replacement of becomes adjusted to the new state of mone- industrial equipment worn out in the process tary conditions, some export projects, which of production. Failure to provide such funds were unprofitable before, appear seemingly adequately makes the profits appear larger profitable. The exporter makes an apparent than they really are. If such apparent surplus profit—in domestic currency—although he profits are dealt with as if they were real may sell at a lower price in foreign currency. profits, the result is capital consumption. As But what really goes on is that he gives the German business was slow in discarding the domestic products away at a price which old custom of writing off annually a fixed enables him only to buy a smaller quantity percentage of the original costs of equip- of foreign products. It is true, the nation ment, it virtually reduced the amount of cap- whose currency has been devalued exports ital invested. more during this interval, but it gets in With the rapid progress of inflation more exchange only less or, at least, not more than and more businessmen began to comprehend previously for a smaller quantity exported. that their methods were suicidal. They This is what the economists have in mind started what was called “the flight into real when speaking of “apparent” gains. These values” (Flucht in die Sachwerte). They gains are the result of false reckoning and began to reinvest the apparent profits in self-deception. their plants. It did not matter for them whether these investments were reasonable The Huge Inflationary Profits or not. Their only concern was to get away of Business from the mark at any cost. Later events have evidenced that a great part of the invest- It is asserted again and again that German ments made in the years of the inflation by business flourished in the years of the great the German banks and the independent busi- inflation. In fact, the annual reports of the ness concerns were malinvestments. German big German corporations and the big Ger- business emerged from the trial of the infla- man banks showed fat profits, and high div- tion period financially weakened. The big idends went to the stockholders. (The Ger- German banks were already in 1924 on the man banks were not merely banks, but at the verge of insolvency. same time holding companies owning a con- Of course, the Germans, steeped in the trolling part of the common stock of many monetary fallacies of Bendixen and Knapp,[2] manufacturing corporations.) were not aware of this fact. Neither were the However, these gains were often apparent foreign bankers and investors shrewd only, a mere product of the fact that the enough to judge correctly the plight of the businessman’s economic calculation employed German big banks and of many of the big the mark as a common denominator. When German business concerns. In the twenties translated into a less fluctuating foreign cur- foreign loans to the Reich, the member rency, for instance, into dollars, they revealed states, the municipalities and to the banks themselves frequently as losses. and big business amounted to about 20 It did not matter for German business billion Reichsmarks. Besides, foreigners whether prices in gold and in dollars were ris- invested $5 billions directly in German busi- ing or falling. Prices in marks were rising ness. This huge inflow—against which repa- whatever the movement of prices on the world ration payments of about $10.8 billions had market was. The sale of the products and to be held—disguised for a few years the inventories netted big paper profits because frailty of the big banks. When the depression prices in marks were soaring ceaselessly. ended foreign lending to Germany, the col- A second source of paper profits was pro- lapse of the banks could no longer be vided by insufficient writing off of deprecia- delayed. It occurred in 1931 as the payoff tion. The goal of laying aside a portion of both of inflation and of ignorance of funda- the annual earnings in a depreciation fund is mental economic issues. 12 Business Under German Inflation The belief that a sound monetary system can once again be attained without making substantial changes in economic policy is a serious error.