I am not sure that I attributed anything to Galbraith other than his statement about the 1929 Wall Street Crash.
In any case, Galbraith is known as an economist, not as a historian. Nevertheless, though one may dispute his Keynsian/liberal economic outlook, it would probably be better not to question his knowledge of history. I suppose that a confirmed enemy of Galbraith (most of whom are reactionaries) might say that Harvard University made a terrible mistake in employing him, that the juries that awarded him any number of prizes may have been misguided, and that his numerous admiring readers may be misled.
The German hyperinflation occurred a decade before the Nazis got complete control:
"In the early 1920s Germany experienced one of the most severe inflations of all time.1 The inflation was not apparent in 1920, but began showing up in 1921. Thereafter it got steadily worse until it came to an abrupt halt at the end of 1923. At its worst in the second half of 1923, prices rose more than fivefold each week.
Some idea of the magnitude of this catastrophe can be seen in table below. During 1920 and early in 1921 the signs of inflation were mixed. The price of food was increasing, but the price of dollars in terms of marks (the mark was the name of the German currency) was dropping, and so were the prices of products bought from the United States. However, the signs of inflation were unmistakable in the next year, from mid 1921 to mid 1922. In this period prices increased about sixfold--that is, it took six marks at the end of the period to buy what one mark would have bought at the beginning. But this rapid inflation, greater than any yearly inflation in the history of the United States, was only a prelude for what was to happen.
From the middle of 1922 until the middle of 1923, prices increased by over 100 times. Measured by the price of food, prices were 135 times higher at the end of the period than they were at the beginning. Measured by how many marks it took to buy a dollar, prices were 222 times higher. Yet even this horrid inflation was mild compared to what happened from July to November of 1923, when prices increased by somewhere between a million and a billion times their previous level.
ingrimayne.saintjoe.edu |
