by ReverseEngineer » Fri 19 Dec 2008, 03:07:53
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', 'B')efore World War I, Germany was a prosperous country; a gold-backed currency, expanding industry, and a world leader in optics, chemicals, and machinery. The German Mark was exchanged four or five to the dollar. In 1923, at the peak of the German hyperinflation, the German government required 1,783 printing presses, running 24 hours a day, to print money. The exchange rate was one trillion Marks to one dollar, and a wheelbarrow full of money would not even buy you a cup of coffee. Most of the German people never saw it coming.
Germany abandoned the gold backing of its currency in 1914 and financed the war with government borrowing. After the war, the Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to make reparations payment in gold-backed Marks. Between 1914 and 1919 prices doubled. In 1922, they doubled once more....
How did this all end? The German people turned to Adolph Hitler in 1933.
There are similarities to Weimar Germany in the current collapse, but there are significant differences also. As noted, while Weimar was driving the Germans into incredible impoverishment, the rest of the world was enjoying the Boom times of the Roaring Twenties. There were functioning economies with Gold backed currency everyone thought was the cat's pajamas.
Today, there are NO boom countries anywhere, nobody backs money with PMs and when we go BUST, about everyone else goes bust also.
How was Hitler able to rise to power in Germany? He was financed by the Thyssens and Prescott Bush and the Rockefellers. Who is going to finance the Wannabee Hitler of the USA, and with what money? Even assuming somebody somewhere has a mountain of Gold stashed in their basement, its not real useful for buying anything at the moment, and its hard to figure just when it will be useful for that.
Japan is in the Doghouse with its own debt problems and their own Stumulus package, China is closing down factories and has stopped importing Diesel and also injected a stimulus to get their economy moving, but its not moving any better than the American Economy.
Pretty clearly Global Trade is coming to an absolute standstill, in the time of Weimar Germany it was functioning quite well. In the time of Weimar Germnay the USA had a vast reservoir of Oil, today the only folks with anything you might call vast in this regard are the Saudis, but those fields are stuck in a nation that has about no food production capability of its own. Without global trade and the ability to trade their Oil for Food with somebody, they will starve faster than about anyone else.
Although the future doesn't look to good for the USA, it looks WORSE for China, with 1.3 Billion people clearly one of the worst cases of Overshoot on the planet. The Japanese are still stuck on a tiny island with a rapidly aging population and plenty of debt. The Ruskies are depopulating rapidly and they are quite broke also as capital has fled that country with the collapse of their stock market.
Although there are many pressures toward World War here and the rise of dictatorships like the 30s, its quite hard to see how the next round will be financed by anyone with a deep enough pocket to fund a Hitler, loan him money to build a military machine with deficit spending, and then assuming that happenned just who would he go to war against and what would he get out of it?
Finally, assuming this economic collapse does generat up an American Hitler, who would he be? Will he be one of the current ruling Elite, or will he be a Military General or some thug from the streets of LA with a solid resume of ruthless killing and great survival skills?
While there is little doubt we will have economic dislocation throughout the world here that surpasses the pain that Weimar Germany went thru, its less clear that the scenario of the monetary system collapse thru hyper-inflation will play out precisely the same way it did for Weimar. I certainly do not see the EU as being a safe place for money, what with all the problems the Germans have, the Spaniards have, the Greeks have etc etc etc. Neither is China a real safe bet for money, and I really have to doubt the value of Chinese SHTI Reprocessing Plants as an Investment that will yield big returns.
You have to figure more on Balkanization of larger states and internecine warfare rather than large conflicts between nation states in this scenario. Impoverishment for all seems most likely, and its quite difficult to peg any of the current major players as the one to come out on top of the pile when the building collapses. Rather than one Big Hitler, rather I think we will see many Little Hitlers, many Little Stalins and perhaps a few Little Ghandis and a few Little Sitting Bulls.
To make an estimation in your mind, just imagine you could go anywhere in the world right now and choose a country to park yourself. Would you choose to move to Russia? To China? To Japan? To the UK? To the USA? Would any of these current major players in the world of the old financial system seem to you to be a place that will do well in the coming storm? It seems unlikely to me, a better bet would seem to be a country like New Zealand, although clearly they have their own problems as well.
No doubt the non-stop running of the Printing Press by the Ben & Henry show is doing little to actually solve the financial mess we are all in, but is it really making it any worse? The system is bound to fail no matter what you do here, we are in serious overshoot and we are on the downslope of the Peak Oil curve, so about nothing could actually solve the problems here short of a massive die off of world population. It does appear however to have bought us some time, since at least today I still could buy a nice Rack of Lamb imported here from Australia. Will I be able to get one next year at this time? It seems to me to be unlikely, but I have been wrong on the timeline for how the collapse works its way into the real economy too many times to make a guarantee that next year I won't still be able to buy a Rack of Lamb from Australia. This remains the big unanswered question, just precisely when the US Dollar completely collapses and the world financial system gets rebooted, and HOW it gets rebooted. I can't see it happening for a LONG time, but maybe I am missing something.
Reverse Engineer