Fiscal News and Inflationary Expectations in Germany after World War I

1986 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 769-794 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven B. Webb
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Price Stability ◽  
World War ◽  
Tax Reforms ◽  
Government Deficits ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Negative News ◽  
Inflation Tax ◽  
The Government

Inflation in Germany from 1919 to 1923 resulted from the accumulation and the anticipation of government deficits. Inflationary expectations depended therefore on fiscal news. Allied demands for reparations, the occupation of the Ruhr, and domestic revolts were important negative news and led to increased inflation. Tax reforms and eventually the end to government deficits were important positive news and ushered in periods of price stability. Political events were fiscal news as they changed the chances for the government to balance the budget.

The Supply of Money and Reichsbank Financing of Government and Corporate Debt in Germany, 1919–1923

1984 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 499-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven B. Webb
Keyword(s):  
Monetary Policy ◽  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Money Supply ◽  
Price Stability ◽  
Corporate Debt ◽  
Social Programs ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Government

During the five years of inflation, price stability, and hyperinflation in Germany after World War I, three factors determined the growth of the money supply. First, the Reichsbank freely issued money in exchange for whatever government or corporate debt the private sector did not wish to hold at the official discount rate. Second, the government persistently ran large deficits. Political instability and the inflation itself prevented taxation adequate to pay for social programs, subsidies to the railroad and businesses, and reparations to the Allies. The third factor was expectations of inflation, which, as they became more pessimistic, led people to hold less and monetize more of the outstanding stock of debt. Thus, the money supply was partly endogenous and partly dependent on government fiscal policy. The monetary policy of the Reichsbank, although essential to the inflation process, was a constant and passive one until stabilization at the end of 1923.

The Government of War

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-793
Author(s):  
Dina Rizk Khoury
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
State System ◽  
World War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Security Services ◽  
Short Piece ◽  
The Government

I write this piece as Iraq, following Syria, descends into a civil war that is undermining the post–World War I state system and reconfiguring regional and transnational networks of mobilization and instrumentalizations of violence and identity formation. That the Middle East has come to this moment is not an inevitable product of the artificiality of national borders and the precariousness of the state system. It is important to avoid this linear narrative of inevitability, with its attendant formulations of the Middle East as a repository of a large number of absences, and instead to locate the current wars in a specific historical time: the late and post–Cold War eras, marked by the agendas of the Washington Consensus and the globalization of neoliberal discourses; the privatization of the developmental and welfare state; the institutional devolution and multiplication of security services; and the entrenchment of new forms of colonial violence and rule in Israel and Palestine and on a global scale. The conveners of this roundtable have asked us to reflect on the technopolitics of war in the context of this particular moment and in light of the pervasiveness of new governmentalities of war. What I will do in this short piece is reflect on the heuristic and methodological possibilities of the study of war as a form of governance, or what I call the “government of war,” in light of my own research and writing on Iraq.

scholarly journals The Politics of Russian Memory: The Great War in the European Context

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-235
Author(s):  
Olga S. Porshneva
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Central Committee ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
Red Army ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Great War

This article examines how the historical memory of World War I emerged and developed in Russia, and also compares it to how Europeans have thought about the conflict. The author argues that the politics of memory differed during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In the wake of the 1917 Revolution, Bolshevik efforts to re-format the memory of the Great War were part of its attempt to create a new society and new man. At the same time, the regime used it to mobilize society for the impending conflict with the 'imperialist' powers. The key actors that sought to inculcate the notion of the war with imperialism into Soviet mass consciousness were the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party, the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, and, in particular, the Red Army and Comintern. The latter two worked together to organize the major campaigns dedicated to war anniversaries, which were important both to reinforce the concept of imperialist war as well as to involve the masses in public commemorations, rituals and practices. The Soviet state also relied on organizations of war veterans to promote such commemorative practices while suppressing any alternative narratives. The article goes on to explain how, under Stalin, the government began to change the way it portrayed the Great War in the mid-1930s. And after the Second World War, Soviet politics of memory differed greatly from those in the West. In the USSR the Great Patriotic War was sacralized, while the earlier conflict remained a symbol of unjust imperialist wars.

‘Messing with Coloured People’: The 1918 Police Strike in Cape Town, South Africa

1992 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Nasson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
South African ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
World War ◽  
Natural Justice ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Lower Ranking ◽  
The Government ◽  
South African Police ◽  
National Police

This article seeks to provide an interpretation of a strike by white policemen in Cape Town in 1918. It argues that this defensive dispute over wages and living conditions can best be understood not simply through an examination of service dissatisfaction in the urban police community, but by incorporating this episode into the larger picture of South African police development in the early decades of the present century. In this broader context, several factors seem general and influential: local social resentments over the terms of national police organization after Union; police practices and attitudes, especially in relation to the increasing recruitment of Afrikaners; the position of white working-class policemen in the ‘civilized labour’ stratification of Cape Town society; and, most visibly, the inflationary effect of the First World War on the living standards of poorly paid, disaffected and unorganized constables. It is argued that these converging pressures generated a severe crisis of work discipline in 1917 and 1918 which tipped the Cape Town police into a classical natural justice strike. While ordinary policemen were split between petitioners and younger, less hesitant radicals, there was considerable popular support for strikers’ claims, both within the Cape police body and the local white labour movement. The government used a strategy of provisional concessions to settle the dispute. In conclusion, it is suggested that the strike experience helped to strengthen associational bonds between lower-ranking policemen and that a commitment by the state to improved service conditions provided an anxious constabulary with a more secure ‘civilized labour’ identity in the post-World War I period.

The research laboratories of Associated Electrical Industries Ltd

1951 ◽  
Vol 210 (1101) ◽  
pp. 145-172 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Power Transmission ◽  
World War ◽  
Group Research ◽  
Good Selection ◽  
Transmission Equipment ◽  
The World ◽  
Prime Movers ◽  
The Government ◽  
Research Facilities

The Associated Electrical Industries Ltd. comprises a group of independent companies concerned with the manufacture of prime movers, generators, power-transmission equipment and practically every kind of electricity-consuming device. The two largest of the group of companies are the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Co. Ltd. at Trafford Park, Manchester, and the British Thomson-Houston Co. Ltd. at Rugby. While there are research facilities in each of the companies of the group, research has until recently been concentrated very largely in the laboratories of the two main companies, the laboratories being separate autonomous bodies independently directed. Both these laboratories have been developed since World War I and both played no insignificant part in the last war. Accounts of each are being presented by Mr Churcher and Mr Davies. I should like to make brief mention of one matter about which there is frequent misunderstanding. It is often said that industry takes the best men from the universities, but my experience has shown that this traffic is in fact two-way. It is true that our companies take hundreds of young graduate engineers from universities all over the world, and of these a good selection is recruited to the research departments; but from our laboratories have also gone very many trained scientists into a large number of university positions, over a score into professorial chairs and senior positions throughout the government scientific services. It is my profound conviction that this flow in both directions is most desirable and should be encouraged as much as possible.

The Radium Committee of the Royal Society and the fate of the substances purchased by it

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Todd
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Research Fund ◽  
World War ◽  
Ernest Rutherford ◽  
History Of ◽  
Government Laboratory ◽  
The Government ◽  
First Time

In this article, documents relating to the history of the Radium Committee of the Royal Society are collated for the first time. Founded in 1903, the committee had its status enhanced in 1904, when the Goldsmiths' Company donated £1000 for the establishment of a Radium Research Fund. Two years later the fund was used to purchase 500 kg of pitchblende residues from the Austrian government. The French chemist Armet de Lisle was contracted to perform the first stage of extraction, and the process of purification was performed at the Government Laboratory during 1907 by the Government Analyst, T. E. Thorpe, yielding an estimated 70 mg of radium chloride. In 1914 the unexpended balance of about £500 was awarded to Ernest Rutherford, but the bulk was not used until 1921, when Rutherford had moved to Cambridge. The fund was then used to purchase radium that had been on loan to him from Austria before World War I. After Rutherford's death in 1937 the Committee was wound up, and the Society's radium was controlled on a more ad hoc basis. After Thorpe's work in 1907, the radium was lent out successively to several leading scientists until its existence was last recorded in 1953.

The Hungarian Diet of 1839-40 and the Fate of Szechenyi's Middle Course

Slavic Review ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Barany
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
The Government

Halfway between the publication of Széchenyi's Credit (Hitel, 1830) and the revolutionary year 1848, the Diet of 1839-40 stands out as an interesting episode of the Hungarian Reform Age. The importance of this period is generally recognized, but its interpretation is still problematic. Pre-World War I liberal historiographers tended to blame the “government of Vienna” for all the blunders committed before 1848. The conservative Szekfű school, more charitable to Metternich and Austria, was no less nationalistic in its approach to the non-Magyar minorities of Hungary, maintaining the myth of Magyar “spiritual supremacy” between the two world wars. Today, Marxist Hungarian historians try to be fair in their writings about the nationality problem but frown upon analyses of Austro-Hungarian cooperation, considering them apologies for the Habsburg Gesamtmonarchie. Modern Western historians, too, differ in their evaluation of nineteenth-century Hungarian reform and its leaders.

scholarly journals The Origin of the Polish National Loan Fund and Its Operation on the Polish Lands

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (3 ENGLISH ONLINE VERSION) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Eliza Komierzyńska-Orlińska
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Banking System ◽  
Emergency Situation ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Loan Fund ◽  
Monetary Unit ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Government ◽  
First World

The idea of establishing the Bank of Poland as the central bank of the Second Polish Republic and introducing a new currency appeared shortly after Poland regained its independence. At the beginning of 1919, in the economic circles it was believed that one of the initial steps taken by the government would be to establish a new issuing bank in place of the Polish National Loan Fund, which had appeared on the Polish territory in an emergency situation—during the First World War, and which, contrary to the original (both German and Polish) plans survived for 7 years and was transformed after the war into the first bank of issue in the now independent Polish State. The Polish National Loan Fund established by the Germans as an issuing institution by way of the ordinance of December 9, 1916 establishing the Polnische Landes Darlehnskasse was granted the privilege of issuing a new currency, that is a new monetary unit under the name marka polska. The German authorities were guided by various objectives when creating the new issuing institution—first of all, the aim was to limit the area of circulation of the German mark and to create an instrument that would draw in the occupied area of the Polish territory to finance the war, contrary to the assurances of the occupying authorities that the PKKP would be an institution supporting the economy and banking system of the country—the Kingdom of Poland, whose creation was envisaged after the end of World War I.

scholarly journals Employment issue in the journals of the Special Council on State Defense (1915-1917)

2021 ◽  
pp. 12-25
Author(s):  
Irina Shilnikova ◽  
Georgii Georgievich Kasarov
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Nongovernmental Organizations ◽  
Negotiation Process ◽  
World War ◽  
Considerable Part ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government ◽  
State Defense ◽  
Soviet Historiography ◽  
Employment Issue

Soviet historiography features a thesis that in the course of struggle against industrial strikes in Russia during the World War I, the government applied solely repressive measures, including armed suppression of worker strikes, prosecution, imprisonment, and conscription. The reports of proceedings of Special Council on State Defense, which was composed of the representatives of key ministries, State Soviet, State Duma, as well as entrepreneurial circles and nongovernmental organizations, allowed the government representatives to more objectively understand the essence of the “employment issue” in the conditions of protracted war and possible methods of its solution, including prevention of strikes, especially at the enterprises involved in execution of defense orders. The article presents the analysis of the content of discussions and decisions on the employment issue adopted within the framework of Special Council for ensuring steady operation of factories and preventing downtime as a result of strikes and quitting of employees. It is worth noting that a considerable part of political and military figures, major industrialists supported peaceful methods of solution the employment issue, such as negotiation process, seeking compromises, creation of reconciliation chambers and other specific authorities. However, the absence of an agreement and interaction between different departments impeded the development and implementation of prompt and effective measures to address the employment issue.

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