Year 2020 will be known in the history as a period of insurmountable struggle, which has made the whole world to join together and fight. The entire humanity is fighting a war with an invisible enemy. Just about everything around us has undergone a sea change. The end of the battle is not in sight as yet. In fact, we have not even reached the proverbial ‘beginning of the end’. The corona pandemic can attack us through a second wave at the fall of the year, even if we can flatten the exponential curves. The global lock down has already had a profound effect on the economy of nations. In India, millions of workers have been thrown out of jobs, and many businesses like the malls and multiplex complexes have shut shop indefinitely. The tourism and hospitality industries have bleak prospects and thousands of sports personalities, who have spent the last four years dreaming of medals in the Tokyo Olympics, will have to wait for at least one more year to show their prowess and skills.
“What next” and “what after the Corona crisis” are questions that beg for an answer. We have to look into the pages of history to see how economies were successfully ‘turned around’ in the past. The period between the two World Wars (1919 to 1939) is an interesting era. Germany was ravaged by WW1. The defeat left them shattered. But what they achieved by the year 1939, was nothing short of a miracle.i have been researching the life and times of Hjalmar Schacht, and produced a piece for the benefit of those who like a bit of serious economics.
For a long time it had been a mystery to me as to how Germany recovered from the devastation of World War I, the stiff and unfair terms of the Versailles Treaty, the hyperinflation, the reparations and the Great Depression of 1939. I had read a little bit about Hitler’s dictum of using deficit financing for a fair day’s work. But I did not know any details.
The provocation for this article was a paper titled “Fiscal Options & Response to Covid-19 Epidemic (FORCE)”, which the IRS Association presented to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and the Union Finance Ministry. The paper recommended raising income tax rate to 40 per cent for those who earn over Rs 1 crore a year, re-introduction of wealth tax, effecting a one-time Covid-19 cess of 4 per cent on taxable income of over Rs 10 lakh, direct cash transfer of up to Rs 5,000 a month for the poor, and a three-year tax holiday for all corporates and businesses in the healthcare sector.
The Ministry of Finance quickly distanced itself from the paper, making it clear that the paper did not represent government thinking.
Further, the Central Board of Direct Taxes issued chargesheets against three principal commissioner-rank IRS officers for “misguiding” young taxmen and “unauthorisedly” releasing the report to the media.
The bureaucracy in India is very powerful. Many of them would love to go back to the days of Morarji Desai, his 11 tax slabs and his 97.75 % rate at the highest slab of income tax. So, it is very necessary to learn from history and for the public to be aware of different ideas.
Now the internet has opened up huge vistas. What would have required months of study and visits to many libraries is now available if only we take the trouble to search. I stumbled on Dr Hjalmar Schacht and how he was instrumental in German recovery from hyper inflation, from the deflation of the Great Depression and how he co-founded the Bank for International Settlements.
Germany was in dire economic straits on account of losing World War I. The Treaty of Versailles imposed severe conditions on Germany and they had to pay reparations. On top of that, the Allied blockade continued for a year after the war ended. The result was hyperinflation. In 1914, the exchange rate of the German mark to the American dollar was about 4.2 to one. Nine years later, it was 4.2 trillion to one.
The central cause of the hyper inflation was the Reichsbank itself. The term of its president, Rudolf E. A. Havenstein, was for life. He kept issuing ever greater amounts of Papermark for keeping the Reich financially afloat. Finally, on 15 November 1923, the Reichsbank was made to stop monetizing government debt and issuing new money. At the same time, it was decided to make one trillion Papermark equal to one Rentenmark. On 20 November 1923, Havenstein died suddenly of a heart attack. That same day, Hjalmar Schacht, the Currency Commissioner, took action and stabilized the Papermark against the US dollar: the Reichsbank made 4.2 trillion Papermark equal to one US Dollar. And as one trillion Papermark was equal to one Rentenmark, the exchange rate was 4.2 Rentenmark for one US dollar. This was exactly the exchange rate that had prevailed between the Reichsmark and the US dollar before World War I. The “miracle of the Rentenmark” marked the end of hyperinflation.
Hjalmar Schact
