{"id":27554,"date":"2026-07-09T05:14:25","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T03:14:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=27554"},"modified":"2026-07-09T05:14:25","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T03:14:25","slug":"27554","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/?p=27554","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>After World War II, the German government devised another, noninflationary way of getting rid of its public debt: a monetary reform that divided the value of old debts by a hundred, coupled with a system of extremely high levies on the holders of large assets, so as to compensate for the losses to small and medium asset holders; the largest fortunes were assessed at up to 50 percent of their asset value. Germany adopted this reform in 1952, and it remained in force until the 1980s.<\/p>\n<p>When we hear Germans speaking on the subject of economics today and saying how absolutely essential it is for Greece to repay its debt down to the last euro, these events seem very far in the past &#8230; It\u2018s often the way of things: history&#8217;s major players have a short memory, especially when it works to their advantage. I think we should resist this historical amnesia, however. It&#8217;s worth recalling that the problem of public debt has been dealt with in different ways over the course of history; there&#8217;s no right way.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"padding-left: 6em; text-indent: -3em;\">\u2014Thomas Piketty, <em>Nature, Culture, and Inequality<\/em>, (London: Scribe, <span class=\"\" style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">2024), 68<\/span>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After World War II, the German government devised another, noninflationary way of getting rid of its public debt: a monetary reform that divided the value of old debts by a hundred, coupled with a system of extremely high levies on &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/?p=27554\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}