A Run on Hedge Funds
There may be no one left to trust. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, now Bernard Madoff arrested over alleged $50 billion fraud [Reuters]; where is a safe place to put one's money?
I suppose if I had a few billion dollars in some hedge funds right now I would be asking to take my money out and start buying gold before the dollar collapses altogether and even before Obama gets his chance to ruin our economy. The amounts of moneys being bandied about in our society today are so huge that it staggers the mind. Baseball players get quarter billion dollar contracts and even more [suite101], Detroit needs tens of billions just to eek by for a month.
The last time I saw numbers these huge was when I was a child (1953) collecting Reichsmarks from 1923 Germany because it made me feel like a billionaire. I had million mark notes, milliard (billion) mark notes and even trillion mark notes. The photo here is a 100 Billion Mark Note from Oct 1923.
In June of 1923 a pound of butter cost 14,000 marks [preussen-chronik.de], or about 12 cents a pound. Here is how it increased in the following months of 1923:
| Month | Marks per lb butter | short form |
| Jul | 45,000 | 45-thousand |
| Aug | 589,000 | 589-thousand |
| Sep | 12,600,000 | 12.6-Million |
| Oct | 3,219,461,000 | 3.2-Billion |
| Nov | 2,795,808,213,000 | 2.7-Trillion |
So if in the beginning of October of 1923 you were making 3.2 billion marks per hour digging ditches you had to immediately go out and buy a tub of butter because the next day it would cost 6.4 billion marks and the day after that 12.8 billion marks and so you would ask for increasing amounts of wages until people were shopping with bags full of notes racing from store to store to buy things before the current notes became worthless. The government presses could hardly keep up with the printing.
Soon businesses were paying wages in bread and other commodities. Of course all savings were lost. If you didn't use it, you lost it. A Bill Gates style billionaire in 1922 Germany with 50 billion marks in a bank account wouldn't be able to buy a pound of butter one year later.
The details of why the financial system collapsed are consequences of the occupation of the Ruhr district by the European powers to enforce the unfair reparation payment requirements on Germany after WWI (see Treaty of Versailles Wiki).
In one year, 1922, Germany went from slight inflation to utter financial chaos and hyperinflation by the end of 1923.
It only takes a single event. Making Germany pay for the first World War seemed like a good idea. Until the Second World War.
Making banks give loans to minorities and poor people might have seemed a good idea at the time (1977), not to me of course, but to those who have principles and "care" for the downtrodden.
We have not yet gotten to the point where the dollar is completely worthless, but I say let's give Obama a chance to do that.
