Read by Antony Ferguson

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.

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