James Turk has released a 34 minute video interview with historian Adam Fergusson (author of the classic When Money Dies) discussing the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany and comparisons to today's fiscal and debt crisis.
Fergusson discusses how the hyperinflation affected different groups in German society in different ways – with debtors benefitting and huge numbers of middle-class savers wiped out. Riots, corruption and political extremism were just some of the malignancies encouraged by the hyperinflation. He points out that those who held hard currencies as well as people who held tangible assets like gold and silver were in-large part protected from the worst economic consequences of the hyperinflation. In his words: “gold remained at all times in Germany the measure of what was important to them.”
