Winners, losers, and the politics behind inflation—from Weimar to now.
Why did a loaf of bread cost “26 billion won” in 1923?
Imagine paying 26 billion won for one loaf of bread.
Or buying a coffee for 6.5 million won, then seeing the next cup jump to 9.1 million.
Unthinkable—yet that was everyday life in 1923 Germany.
This wasn’t random chaos.
It was a politically engineered collapse of money.
Versailles and the price of defeat
In November 1918 Germany lost World War I.
Under the Versailles settlement, it faced enormous reparations and near-total disarmament.
The bill—roughly two years of national output—was widely seen as unpayable.
John Maynard Keynes called it a “Carthaginian peace.”
His warning was simple.
Unpayable debts breed resentment and disorder.
Printing without brakes: inflation by design
By 1921 the government and central bank were effectively printing marks without limit.
The stated aim was to get foreign currency to meet reparations.
But more marks only made marks worth less.
Prices sprinted ahead by the hour.
Shops changed tags constantly.
People trusted goods more than cash.
Why continue?
Because the strategy wasn’t to pay.
It was to make payment impossible.
If the economy collapsed, the Allies could not squeeze milk from a dead cow.
The “passive resistance” to the French-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 pushed money-printing even harder.
Two million striking workers needed pay.
The government printed it.
Inflation turned hyperinflation.
Who lost—and who got rich?
Not everyone sank.
Hugo Stinnes—the “King of the Ruhr”—refused to hold marks.
Whenever cash arrived, he bought real businesses and hard assets: banks, newspapers, hotels, factories.
Exporters gained too.
A collapsing mark made German goods cheap abroad, and foreign earnings converted into mountains of marks.
Highly leveraged firms were winners.
Inflation vaporized the real burden of their debts.
Insiders who read policy early borrowed to buy property and plant, then watched liabilities shrivel while assets held value.
Meanwhile, wages rose but rarely kept up.
Well-educated talent took lower pay as the middle class crumbled.
Savers were punished.
Borrowers with real assets were rewarded.
The gap between the informed and the uninformed became a canyon.
The collapse of the middle class
The sharpest shock hit the social core: the middle class.
Professors, civil servants, and professionals on fixed pay fell fastest.
Families sold furniture to buy food.
When that was gone, hunger followed.
Order, thrift, and prudence—old virtues—stopped working.
Disillusion with the Weimar state deepened.
A trust-based community morphed into a jungle of power.
A modern echo: the U.S., 2020–2022
A century later, parts of this story rhymed in the pandemic.
Massive fiscal support in 2020–2021 was followed by rising prices in 2021 and a peak in 2022.
The difference: safeguards.
The Federal Reserve raised rates rapidly from March 2022 and halted quantitative easing, helping cool inflation.
Even so, large debts and rising interest costs remain a drag.
Economic stress can spill into political extremes.
Yet the dollar’s reserve status, a diverse economy, and a more independent central bank mark a crucial contrast with Weimar.
What to remember—and a question for you
Monetary expansion feels like an easy fix at first.
Over time, it invoices society with hidden, compounding costs.
Once trust in money breaks, rebuilding it is brutally hard.
If volatility is the rule rather than the exception, what choices will you make—today—to protect and grow your assets?
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