By SPIEGEL Staff
In most cases the country's coffers were wiped out by war. But in each case, the countries managed to bring themselves back from ruin. They proved to be incredibly resourceful in using their connections to banks, companies and, especially, the people.
The simplest solution was for states to just outright refuse to pay back their debts. In 1557, Spain's King Philipp II refused to pay his country's debts after its expensive military battles against the Dutch and the Ottomans. It was a decision that seriously damaged lender banks in Augsburg, Germany, and they never fully recovered.
Even after the Revolution, France's new regents had an even more extreme answer. They expropriated property from churches, major landowners and executed some lenders.
A similarly brutal option was to go to war to in order to plunder occupied areas. But such methods of budget consolidation tended to only happen when things started to collapse. Even in the old days, inflation was the preferred method of dealing with debt. They created more money and devaluated it. It's a method that was adopted as early as ancient Rome, where the Romans devaluated their coins by using fewer precious metals in them. It became a standard practice. In Vienna, the silver content in the Kreuzer coin was reduced by 60 percent between 1500 and 1800 and the Ausgburg pfennig lost more than 70 percent of its value.
Once paper money was introduced, the process was further simplified, since you could just print it. The first country to start printing money on a grand scale was France in the 18th century, when it needed to pay off the mountain of debt accrued by Louis XIV. In times of crisis, French governments ever since have fallen for this temptation.
The Warning of Hyper-Inflation
In 1914, with the start of World War I, the German Reich also began to unpeg its currency from gold. Until then, anyone could trade paper money for precious medals. Unpegging the currency meant that the amount of money in circulation rose from 13 to 60 billion marks by the end of the war, while the products on offer were reduced by one-third. Prices skyrocketed.
The disastrous development reached its peak in 1923 with hyperinflation. The exchange rate at the time was 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar. Bank notes were printed in 130 private printing presses, often on one side only to save ink. The only thing that could stop the mass devaluation was to change currencies.
In November 1923, the government issued the so-called Rentenmark. The previous currency could be exchanged at a rate of 1 trillion marks for 1 Rentenmark. Inflation quickly stopped. People spoke of the "miracle of the Rentenmark." But the truth is that it wiped out the savings and investments of large swaths of the German middle class as well as wealthy people who had been forced to finance the war by buying government bonds that had now been rendered worthless. Banks and insurance companies also lost their capital. The greatest winner, besides people who had loans or mortgages they no longer had to pay back, was the government. Its war debt shrank into insignificance.
These traumatic events remain a part of the Germany's collective memory and they fuel a latent fear of hyperinflation here today. Should people be afraid?
For the moment they don't need to be. Compared to many other countries, Germany is well positioned to ride out the crisis. The economy in recent years has been a lot stronger than other EU members and it is not as dependent on the financial sector as Great Britain. And unlike the United States, it isn't dependent on foreign lenders.
Iceland, for its part, is already as good as bankrupt. In Eastern Europe, a number of countries are wobbling -- Latvia has already had to request aid from the IMF and the Eastern European Development Bank. In the capital city of Riga, 40 people were injured in a violent protest that took place on Jan. 13.
Great Britain is also in trouble. And if it weren't for the protection that their membership in the common currency provides them with, some euro zone countries would be fighting for financial survival right now. America, on the other hand, is banking on the fact that it is still considered stabile despite it's enormous problems -- and that the Chinese still hold a huge chunk of their currency reserves in US bonds.
So will things get better? It would be an illusion to believe that countries have learned from their past mistakes, US economists Reinhart and Rogoff warn. In fact, another state could go bankrupt at anytime and take its people down with it.
In this crisis, nothing is unimaginable anymore.
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