{"id":3562,"date":"2013-03-20T09:09:55","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T07:09:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.military-history.us\/?p=3562"},"modified":"2013-03-20T17:34:42","modified_gmt":"2013-03-20T15:34:42","slug":"similarities-between-the-20s-and-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/2013\/03\/similarities-between-the-20s-and-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Similarities Between the 1920’s and Today?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am currently reading The Origins of the First World War (3rd Edition)<\/a>, during a pause in my reading I started thinking about not the origins of WWI but its results. \u00c2\u00a0To say that the peace of Versailles was flawed is an\u00c2\u00a0understatement. \u00c2\u00a0Given the unsettled economic situation of the Euro and the recently\u00c2\u00a0announced renunciation\u00c2\u00a0of deposit guarantees<\/a> by the government of Cyprus I started to wonder if there are\u00c2\u00a0parallels\u00c2\u00a0between then and now despite the lack of a just concluded titanic war on the continent. \u00c2\u00a0I think that the economics are similar, even to the extent of the various crises being self-inflicted wounds.<\/p>\n

There were many things wrong with the Treaty of\u00c2\u00a0Versailles\u00c2\u00a0but perhaps the most fundamental from my perspective\u00c2\u00a0was\u00c2\u00a0the regime of reparations and war\u00c2\u00a0indemnities\u00c2\u00a0imposed on Germany. \u00c2\u00a0The total of debt was equal to\u00c2\u00a0several\u00c2\u00a0hundred\u00c2\u00a0billion\u00c2\u00a0dollars at today’s rates. \u00c2\u00a0In fact, the\u00c2\u00a0German\u00c2\u00a0government finished paying off the last private investors who held\u00c2\u00a0bonds\u00c2\u00a0related to\u00c2\u00a0reparations\u00c2\u00a0in 2010<\/a>. \u00c2\u00a0There is much debate about\u00c2\u00a0whether\u00c2\u00a0the reparations were too high, whether a price can be put on the suffering of war, but that is not the subject if this post. \u00c2\u00a0There is also plenty of debate about\u00c2\u00a0whether\u00c2\u00a0Germany could have repaid in a timely matter without destroying there own economy. \u00c2\u00a0I tend to think they could have, but it would have been painful. \u00c2\u00a0In any event, what the\u00c2\u00a0Germans\u00c2\u00a0did after Versailles was to\u00c2\u00a0progressiveness\u00c2\u00a0devalue their currency to the point of worthlessness al\u00c3\u00a1\u00c2\u00a0Zimbabwe in the 90’s. \u00c2\u00a0They\u00c2\u00a0essentially\u00c2\u00a0inflated away their obligations until they eventually quit payments altogether under Hitler.<\/p>\n

I just\u00c2\u00a0wonder\u00c2\u00a0if some of the other\u00c2\u00a0European\u00c2\u00a0countries are now doing the same thing to their economies in a back-door way to manage their own debts. \u00c2\u00a0How else are we to see the\u00c2\u00a0spendthrift\u00c2\u00a0policies of the PIIGS\u00c2\u00a0group\u00c2\u00a0of countries after the introduction of the euro in 2002?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am currently reading The Origins of the First World War (3rd Edition), during a pause in my reading I started thinking about not the origins of WWI but its results. \u00c2\u00a0To say that the peace of Versailles was flawed… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125,341,81],"tags":[710,410,709,418,707,94,342,83,708],"class_list":["post-3562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-general-history","category-political-history","tag-banking","tag-economics","tag-economy","tag-euro-crisis","tag-euro-zone","tag-europe","tag-general-history-2","tag-geopolitics","tag-monetary-policy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}