Hyperinflation Of Germany In The 1920

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Hyperinflation of Germany in the 1920’s Kyle Clephane Harrison College Composition I Hyperinflation of Germany in the 1920’s In the 1920’s, the world was coming out of the Great War. Most of the countries spent an enormous amount of money to pay for World War 1. Some raised taxes and others borrowed the money to pay for the war. All the governments of the world started to print money, non at the rate that Germany did. This made the German Deutschmark become worthless in less than five years. This paper is about the hyperinflation of Germany in the 1920’s, and the events that caused and ended it. Inflation is a persistent increase in the level of consumer prices. This is always happening, because the supply and demand will never be equal on all products. There will be some products like gold and diamonds that will never meet the wants. Sometimes however there is inflation at a greater than normal rate, this is called hyperinflation. “Most economists agree hyperinflation exists when there is at least a 100 percent rate of inflation in the time span of just a few years.” (Black, 2003) When a country prints money at extremely fast rates the value goes down. Because there is always inflation, the buying power of a currency is also going down. The products that someone bought last year or even last week will cost differently. “It would take you $22 to buy what $1 could buy in 1913.”(Harding, 2010) The most well-known case of hyperinflation happened in Germany in the 1920’s. The best money exemplification of the German hyperinflation is bread. In 1920, a loaf of bread cost 2 German Deutschmarks. In January of 1923, the cost of bread had risen 225% to 450 deutschmark. At the end of Germany’s hyperinflation, a loaf of bread cost a German 430 trillion deutschmark. At the height of the economic crisis, the German Reichsbank was printing 24 hours a day at 300
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