Good stuff from the daily reckoning....
Fannie Mae is the perfect example of today's reckless excess of credit. The GSE mortgage lender just raised its projection of mortgage originations for 2003 to a record $3.7 trillion - this in a $10 trillion U.S. economy and compared to an increase of total mortgage borrowing of just $1 trillion between 1990 and 1996!
Also from the same source...
"The following may also help bring some understanding of what a rapidly expanding money supply can do:
"In his book, titled 'Before The Deluge', Otto Friedrich devoted an entire chapter to the inflation in Germany between 1919 and 1923. He called this chapter 'A Kind Of Madness'. It is a fascinating study. It is worth repeating a small section of his narrative in order to alert readers to the deleterious effects inflation has upon a population:
"A seventy-five-year-old lady, previously a journalist told him, 'Yes, the inflation was by far the most important event of this period. It wiped out the savings of the entire middle class, but those are just words. You have to realize what that meant. There was not a single girl in the entire German middle class who could get married without her father paying a dowry. Even the maids - they never spent a penny of their wages. They saved and saved so that they could get married. When the money became worthless, it destroyed the whole system for getting married, and so it destroyed the whole idea of remaining chaste until marriage.
"'The rich never lived up to their own standards, of course, and the poor had different standards anyway, but the middle class, by and large, obeyed the rules. Not every girl was a virgin when she married, but it was generally accepted that one should be. But what happened from the inflation was that the girls learned that virginity didn't matter any more. The women were liberated.
"'A visiting journalist, Louis Lockner, reported in 1923 he got the usual first impression of cafes crowded with stylishly garbed ladies, but soon found a different story on the side streets off the fashionable boulevards. "I visited a typical Youth Welfare Station", he said later. "Children who looked as though they were eight or nine years old proved to be thirteen. I learned that there were then 15,000 tubercular children in Berlin; that 23% of the children examined by the city health authorities were badly undernourished." The old were equally helpless. One elderly writer, Maximilian Bern, withdrew all his savings, more than 100,000 marks, and spent them on one subway ticket. He took a ride around Berlin and then locked himself in his apartment and starved to death.
"'"Barbarism prevailed," said another old resident, George Grosz. The streets became dangerous....we kept ducking in and out of doorways because restless people, unable to remain in their houses, would go up on the roof tops and shoot indiscriminately at anything they saw. Once when one of these snipers was caught and faced with the man he had shot in the arm, his only explanation was, "But I thought it was a big pigeon".
"'The fundamental quality of the disaster was a complete loss of faith in the functioning of society. Money is important not just as a medium of exchange, after all, but as a standard by which society judges our work, and thus ourselves. If all money becomes worthless, then so does all government, and all society, and all standards. In the madness of 1923, a workman's work was worthless, a widow's savings were worthless, everything was worthless.
"'English historian, Alan Bullock, wrote in his book titled "Hitler: A Study In Tyranny", "The collapse of the currency not only meant the end of trade, bankrupt businesses, food shortage in the big cities and unemployment: it had the effect, which is the unique quality of economic catastrophe, of reaching down to and touching every single member of the community in a way which no political event can. The savings of the middle classes and the working classes were wiped out at a single blow with a ruthlessness which no revolution could ever equal; at the same time the purchasing power of wages was reduced to nothing. Even if a man worked till he dropped it was impossible to buy enough clothes for his family - and work, in any case, was not to be found. The result of the inflation was to undermine the foundations of German society in a way which neither the war nor the revolution of November 1918, nor the Treaty of Versailles had ever done. The real revolution in Germany was the inflation, for it destroyed not only property and money, but faith in property and the meaning of money".'"
CD |
