Hammurabi biography renger johannes

Inspiration for The Great Transformation in the postwar monetary breakdown

Karl Polanyi’s formative years in the aftermath of World War I were a period of monetary turmoil.

Hammurabi biography renger johannes

The United States became a creditor nation for the first time, and demanded payment of the war debts that Keynes warned were unpayable without wrecking Europe’s financial systems. (Hudson, Super Imperialism, 1972, summarizes this era.) France and Britain subjected Germany to unsustainably high reparations debts, while imposing austerity on their own economies by adhering to the gold standard.

Jacques Rueff in France and Bertil Ohlin in the United States argued that Germany could pay any level of reparations in gold – and the Allies could pay their foreign-currency arms debts – by imposing unemployment high enough to make wages low enough to make its products cheap enough to run a trade surplus large enough to pay its debt service.

Most countries followed the ‘hard-money’ idea that money was (or could be made to