[HN Gopher] The Miracle of Worgl
___________________________________________________________________
The Miracle of Worgl
Author : simonebrunozzi
Score : 125 points
Date : 2025-11-18 10:59 UTC (12 hours ago)
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| shevy-java wrote:
| It was ended by force in Tirol in 1933 though:
|
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rgler_Schwundgeld#Proze...
|
| States are very brutal even when you show them alternatives.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > States are very brutal even when you show them alternatives.
|
| States are monopolies in most of what they do, and that enjoy
| the added benefit of defending said monopolies with _actual_
| guns.
| taneq wrote:
| Ultimately all monopolies are defended with guns.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Thus, we want to put the guns into the hands of responsible
| people.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Money is a public good, its value is a social construct and its
| supply should be managed in the interests of society at large.
| The current private debt-money system is the core political and
| economic problem facing us.
|
| The social credit movement (completely different than the Chinese
| concept) is interesting in this regard:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit
| bsenftner wrote:
| That was, of course, another time. Doing what Worgl did today
| would trigger a con artist paradise. Just like everything else in
| this modern corrupt world.
| slightwinder wrote:
| This only shows, at the end, money is just a tool to move people.
| shiandow wrote:
| Careful, that's dangerously close to concluding that money,
| businesses(, ownership) are just tools we made for our own
| benefit. Which is of course socialism.
| slightwinder wrote:
| I'm from Europe, we invented socialism. I'm fine with
| thinking about it.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| That is a fascinating history, and a fun read.
|
| It would be even better if the author addressed drawbacks of
| 'complementary currencies.' On that subject the author seems to
| have no curiosity.
| taneq wrote:
| Turns out made-up money is as good as real money at motivating
| people to do things, and people who aren't living hand-to-mouth
| are naturally interested in longer term investments.
|
| ...what's that? All money these days is made up?!
| IAmBroom wrote:
| That is the definition of fiat currency, yes.
| kamikazechaser wrote:
| There is a movie by the name Shilling From Heaven around this,
| you can find a link in our blog post
| https://grassecon.substack.com/p/worglhtml. Our initial work at
| Grassroots Economics was inspired by this. We even have a smart
| contract that implements this idea (demurrage/Gesell tax) in it
| https://github.com/grassrootseconomics/erc20-demurrage-token.
| imtringued wrote:
| Here is the basic theory:
|
| Classical and neoclassical economics tells us that people always
| spend their entire paycheck on consumer goods (consumption) or
| claims to future consumer goods (savings). There is no money left
| over at the end of the month. Producers are notified in advance
| what to produce. If a worker happens to have $5 left at the end
| of the month and he wants to buy a car, he will use those $5
| towards a non-refundable deposit, even if the car costs tens of
| thousands of dollars, and contractually obligate himself to spend
| the remaining money. No money is ever carried over from one
| period to another, since money is neutral and just a veil.
|
| Meanwhile the observation in the real world is that people often
| hold onto enough money to make the full purchase. From a
| theoretical perspective it means they have found a third option:
| delay making decisions, which is neither saving nor consumption.
| This means producers are not notified of what to produce until
| the very moment of the purchase, which means producers have to
| engage in speculative production ahead of time with no guarantee
| of a sale. They have to hold inventories and possibly throw away
| unsold inventories (because no seller wants them). This holding
| of inventories can manifest itself in the form of idle capital
| and unemployment as well.
|
| What Silvio Gesell discovered on his farming venture that this
| delayed decision making is incredibly wasteful, because most
| products (especially produce) are perishable/non-durable at long
| time scales, this means that waiting produces waste per unit of
| time on part of the speculative producers and give the seller of
| perishables a weaker negotiation position compared to the buyer,
| who is an implicit seller of money, a non-perishable good. This
| means buyers or generally people with money are structurally
| advantaged compared to those who don't. This leads to the
| conclusion that either money should perish as well, or a more
| modern interpretation: negative interest is a reflection of
| rising entropy.
|
| I've seen neoclassicals reject this theory with pretty flismy
| reasoning, mostly based around the idea that people don't hold
| cash or positive balances on their account.
|
| Now this theory isn't perfect by any means, but it is pretty
| interesting and the more you dig, the more it feels like it is
| pointing towards the correct direction. Meanwhile Keynes proposed
| a different theory, which is based on the liquidity of assets
| rather than its durability. Money is more liquid, because
| everyone wants money. This means you can take money and walk to
| any seller and buy their goods. Meanwhile as a seller, you must
| have the particular good that the buyer wants. This is a more
| general theory since it isn't biased exclusively towards money,
| because there is sort of a hierarchy of liquidity. Bank account
| deposits are as liquid or perhaps even more liquid than cash.
| This means bank account balances can be used for payment instead
| of cash. Bonds are essentially money with a duration that binds
| their use, which makes their market value and their nominal value
| diverge. Stocks are on the extreme end of liquid assets, with
| wild fluctuations. Meanwhile things like apples are on the lower
| end of illiquid assets. There is a limit to how many apples a
| person accepts as "payment" for parting with money.
| krapht wrote:
| Why can't delayed spending be categorized as a claim to future
| goods (savings)?
| mapt wrote:
| I have an alternate theory:
|
| If you end up owing a foreign entity vast war debts, war debts
| that destroy your economy by demanding that every economic
| transaction in the sovereign currency be heavily taxed and ship
| its value abroad? You can limit the damage by just not doing
| that. Don't call it a transaction, don't use the sovereign
| currency. Call it a barter, and make up barter tokens, and
| you're in the free and clear. For a certain value of %taxrate,
| you're producing such an unambiguously beneficial increase in
| production and reduction in deadweight losses, escaping the
| austerity trap, that tax collection actually goes up in the
| long run as you shift off of the barter tokens and back to the
| pool of sovereign currency backing them.
| ballenf wrote:
| We have all kinds of currencies today -- gift cards, credit
| scores, loyalty points, forum reputation, follower counts,
| Pokemon/Magic cards, etc.
|
| Some are easier to spend, but all can be traded for other goods
| even if they can't directly be used to pay your taxes.
| basch wrote:
| To the point where I'm approaching a need for a "mint for
| loyalty points" because of how in the dark they accumulate and
| expire. Where is my dashboard to track all points everywhere,
| (and trade, sell, exchange them, which I do know has been
| attempted before.)
| IAmBroom wrote:
| You are inventing a meaninglessly broad definition of currency.
|
| Gift cards are a credit system (a proxy) for existing currency.
|
| No one trades credit scores for goods.
|
| The next three function are bribing a socially powerful person,
| because they don't work in reverse - Kim Kardashian is never
| going to do me a favor in exchange for mentioning her on my IG.
|
| Trading cards are scarcity trading, not fungible proxies for
| wealth. I've gotten a reduction in price for an antique via a
| cold Coke, during a hot outdoor antique show, but that doesn't
| make cold pop cans currency - I wouldn't have gotten twice the
| discount for two of them.
| EGreg wrote:
| Wrote about it here: https://community.intercoin.app/t/local-
| community-currencies...
|
| The key is to take all the gift cards and loyalty points and
| make them interoperable with each other. That's part of our
| Intercoin project
| Archelaos wrote:
| "the town and the community quickly went from an unemployment
| rate of over 30% to near zero"
|
| According to Wikipedia the unemployment rate sank from 21% to
| 15%. --
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rgler_Schwundgeld#Auswi...
| (in German)
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Also, it cured baldness.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Still pretty good.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| less of a "miracle", as the title claims, though
| EGreg wrote:
| Countries will need local currencies during recessions and
| depressions. Here are just a few examples we track on our
| site: https://community.intercoin.app/t/currency-crises-
| around-the...
|
| Here is a history of banking snd new forms of money in the
| USA: https://community.intercoin.app/t/history-of-us-
| banking-and-...
|
| The fact is, from Berkshares to Disney Dollars, local
| currencies are not only possible, but they nudge everyone
| to buy local and hire local, strengthening the economy. The
| miracles have very good explanations :)
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| I chased down the wiki citation
| https://heimat.woergl.at/verschiedenes/freigeld-woergl which
| appears to be an official museum? Translated source says:
|
| > While unemployment in Austria increased by 19% in the period
| of the free money campaign, it fell by 16% in Worgl
|
| The details of words like from/to/by matter a lot, but assuming
| translation is correct, maybe the confusion here is about
| absolute vs relative changes.
|
| Guessing the "over 30%" claim comes from the idea that if Worgl
| was performing normally unemployment would have also increased
| 19%, instead it fell 16%, i.e. performed 35% better than
| baseline, assuming it started in a place around average and
| could have been expected to be average. A different stat than
| 0% unemployment, but interesting
| Vasbarlog wrote:
| That sounds like what Varoufakis planned to implement in Greece
| in case of a default in 2015.
|
| " What we planned to do was this. There's the tax office website,
| as in Britain and everywhere else, where citizens (taxpayers
| accessing the website) use their tax identification number and
| transfer money from their bank account to their tax
| identification number via online banking to pay VAT, income tax,
| and so on. We were planning to surreptitiously create reserve
| accounts linked to each tax identification number without
| notifying anyone, simply so that this system would operate in
| secret. With the push of a button, we could assign PIN numbers to
| the holders of the tax identification numbers (taxpayers). For
| example, in a case where the state owed a pharmaceutical company
| one million euros for medicines purchased on behalf of the
| National Health Service, we could immediately make a transfer to
| the reserve account corresponding to the pharmaceutical company's
| tax identification number and provide them with a PIN number.
| They could use it as a kind of parallel payment mechanism to
| transfer any portion of those digital funds they wanted to any
| tax identification number they owed money to. Or even to use it
| to make tax payments."
|
| https://cemi.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/2911/sapir.6.nov.pdf
| jgeada wrote:
| This type of idea is _never_ popular with the people that have
| large stores of the prior government backed currency. The rich
| never want to have their wealth in any way threatened, and they
| have the reach and influence to make the government protect their
| assets, even if it comes at the cost of causing misery to pretty
| much everyone else.
|
| There ought to be a better balance, and the US found it in the
| period between the end of WWII and the 1970s. High marginal taxes
| on extreme wealth, high inheritance taxes and zealous antitrust
| and anti-monopoly enforcement all kept people's wealth and power
| disparity somewhat in check.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > the US found it in the period between the end of WWII and the
| 1970s. High marginal taxes on extreme wealth, high inheritance
| taxes and zealous antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement all
| kept people's wealth and power disparity somewhat in check.
|
| This.
|
| People like to say Capitalism won the cold war, but in reality
| it was the welfare state with its massive redistribution and
| limits on concentration of power that won.
|
| The current economic and social model isn't even desirable
| enough to prevent people from fantasizing Putin's Russia, it
| would have stood no chance against the USSR in the 50s.
| sershe wrote:
| Social welfare spending only goes up as percentage of GDP.
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-
| long.... What data do you use to distinguish the "current
| economic system"? Notably of course, assuming the variations
| of the US system even mattered, the USSR collapsed after the
| 80ies (deregulation and liberalization having started even
| earlier under Carter, not after post war US economy stagnated
| in the 60ies-70ies.
| d3ckard wrote:
| Common misconception IMO.
|
| High marginal taxes and high inheritance taxes do not affect
| the rich - they eliminate competition for them.
|
| I do agree on antitrust and antimonopoly though.
| bbminner wrote:
| How come they eliminate competition? What if inheritance
| taxes are progressive?
| cassepipe wrote:
| I'd be curious to know more, this is quite unintuitive
| d3ckard wrote:
| Generally, there are no systems that are 100% bulletproof.
| This applies to everything. So, the more power you have,
| the more likely you are to exploit the existing loops.
|
| Who is actually affected? Those less powerful. Progressive
| tax system hits the middle class (actual middle class, _la
| petite bourgeoisie_ , not the modern bullshit redefinition
| of the term) hardest, making it harder for them to make it
| rich and compete with actual rich people.
|
| As the effect, rich protect inheritance by trusts and avoid
| taxes by not having income (plenty of tricks available with
| borrowing), while people like doctors, lawyers, small
| business owners fund the state and hit hard limits on what
| can they make.
|
| Don't believe me? Check how much of the tax income comes
| from top brackets. You may be surprised. Pro tip: system is
| _very_ skewed to the top.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| If the problem is that the system is very skewed to the
| top, then isn't the solution to be found in addressing
| that skew? In closing those particular loopholes?
|
| Shouldn't everyone pay their fair share of taxes? Warren
| Buffett and others seem to think that they should.
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like most people assume there is a reach and
| scope of taxation that isn't really possible. Wealth can be
| expatriated, it can be in non-fungible objects (paintings,
| &c), it can be in goods held in common such that no transfers
| occur (for example, a house that people live in together and
| jointly own).
|
| There isn't anywhere an index or lookup table of all legal
| rights a particular person has to wealth (or, in truth, to
| "things", since anything can be worth something and
| contribute to wealth). There are things they may have a right
| to that they don't even know about.
| thuridas wrote:
| They can hide wealth (at their own risk) but it prevent
| them from extracting money from the country:
|
| The cannot own houses, factories, monopolistic contracts o
| media. It makes harder to influence politics ( in a legal
| way).
|
| The housing issue is specially important because city space
| is limited and the demand is very inelastic
| bccdee wrote:
| Money is important as a vector for power. It doesn't matter
| that much whether a person has a bunch of paintings in a
| Swiss vault when they're an institutional investor
| directing a substantial sector of the economy. And that
| industrial power is relatively easy to divest them of, as
| compared to vault paintings.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| That's true, but most of those can be cracked down on
| simply by saying that any undeclared wealth is forfeit.
| Also, the great proportion of most rich people's actual
| wealth is in forms that are easier to trace (e.g., shares
| of corporations, real estate).
| Bjartr wrote:
| If they don't affect the rich, why have the rock didn't so
| much time, effort, and money eroding such taxes over decades?
| d3ckard wrote:
| Eroding them is beneficial to other groups of society, not
| the rich.
|
| It's like with corporations. Corporations love complex
| legal systems, as they are the only ones with money to deal
| with them. Simplification actually benefits smaller
| enterprises.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| How is high marginal taxes and high inheritance taxes not
| simple?
|
| If complexity is the problem then close the loopholes
| that let people get out of this.
|
| America was not supposed to be a country of monarchs and
| wealthy dynasties, and high inheritance taxes helped
| towards that goal.
| cynicalkane wrote:
| The rich do not, in general, possess Scrooge McDuck vaults full
| of "prior government backed currency". The assets of the
| wealthy are generally real assets and business investments.
|
| Cash is such a poor investment that the word "investment"
| typically means trying to find something more productive than
| holding cash. Neither do alternatives to cash have a reliable
| history of benefitting the poor. In the US there's been lots of
| attempts at local currencies; they tend to fail naturally
| without government interference. Recently, cryptographic
| alternatives to cash have mostly served to benefit crypto
| barons and scammers.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| > At this point, the central bank panicked, and decided to assert
| its monopoly rights by banning complimentary currencies.
|
| Who was running that central bank?
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| > Fortunately, complementary currencies are now legal in just
| about every country, as evidenced by the popularity of
| cryptocurrencies, one form of a complementary currency.
|
| In many countries, cryptocurrency is considered a commodity - not
| money - and therefore disposals (where a cryptocurrency is given
| up in exchange for something else) are taxable events.
|
| This is quite inconvenient and complex compared to money, and
| only less so if you are fortunate enough to be using a
| cryptocurrency that is pegged to your local currency (eg USDC or
| mUSD in place of USD).
|
| Furthermore, if I understand it correctly, the purpose of
| complementary currencies is to act as a form of capital outflow
| restriction: you have a limited amount of capital in your town,
| and you want it to remain in your town alone. A complementary
| currency, which can only be spent locally, restricts the outflows
| of capital and allows it to remain local and do useful work
| multiple times within your town rather than potentially enriching
| other towns.
|
| Cryptocurrency doesn't intrinsically do that at all, although
| there are certainly some tokens designs that can replicate it eg
| LP emissions on decentralized exchanges.
| hgomersall wrote:
| It's not money because there's no associated liability.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Right, not intrinsically. Sometime tokens _are_ IOUs e.g.
| redeemable stablecoins, where the issuer promises to swap the
| token for bank money. But for tax purposes most jurisdictions
| still treat them as commodities AFAIK, to my point earlier.
|
| And fiat isn't that different either: central bank currency
| are technically liabilities, but there's nothing concrete you
| can redeem them for beyond more of the same money...
| EGreg wrote:
| This is what a lot of people get wrong. Money doesn't have
| to have liabilities, only fiat currencies do. Commodity
| money eg gold or silver are valuable in and of themselves,
| for instance. The government sues signiorage there.
|
| However, individual liabilities are a great way to
| introduce currencies into circulation. Start with eg
| loyalty points at a restaurant or credits redeemable aboard
| a ship etc. We are working on that:
| https://community.intercoin.app/t/local-community-
| currencies...
|
| A city can skip all that and just issue a UBI to all its
| citizens in its own currency, and start accepting taxes and
| fees in that currency. Read this:
| https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-
| basi...
| hgomersall wrote:
| All money ever has had an associated liability. Commodity
| money absolutely relied on the face value as the basis of
| the commodity value. Any metal/face value disparity could
| lead to cross border arbitrage (making use of
| counterfeiting), but intrinsic to the process is the
| associated liability of the issuer. Otherwise you're just
| trading assets.
| EGreg wrote:
| Seigniorage doesnt create liability
|
| But commodity money doesn't require seigniorage
| vvpan wrote:
| All of that said the most interesting experiments in
| currency/tokenization/etc are happening on the blockchain. Are
| they successful? It's mixed but I think blockchain allows
| people to easily try new things and it's been fascinating to
| see. For example (and I'll do my best to explain in a sentence
| or two):
|
| - Bread Cooperative (https://breadchain.xyz/) - Active project.
| Creates a "vault" for your stablecoins where accumulated
| lending yield is distributed to non-profits based on a weighted
| vote.
|
| - Circles UBI (https://circles.garden/) - Active project.
| Creates a network of wallets where a wallet's humanity is
| proven through economic means. Each network participant starts
| receiving a token of the Circle's native "currency" effectively
| creating a network of humans in which money creation is evenly
| democratized.
|
| - Reflexer RAI (https://reflexer.finance/) - More inactive.
| Created a "un-pegged" stablecoin. Meaning something that is not
| a dollar but is stable. It's been described as "capital
| inefficient" meaning you gotta put a lot of collateral in to
| get mint RAI, which appears to be a fatal flaw. But I love all
| experiments in unpegged stable coins.
|
| And in general the ecosystem is full of all sorts of
| communities with their little currencies that have all sorts of
| properties like stability, minting mechanisms, distribution,
| voting power, you name it. It is not all good but I think it's
| fascinating.
|
| Addendum: Yannis Varoufakis (economist, author and briefly
| Greece's Minister of Finance) has a book in which he outlines
| an example of a utopian economic system. (Great book). While
| being generally anti-crypto he bases the central bank around a
| transparent blockchain "smart contract". Any money printing by
| this contract is easily trackable and obvious to others and the
| yield generated from central-bank lending is distributed to all
| citizens. He has recently pursued this as an actual goal,
| albeit in a different form (I have yet to get into the
| details): https://monetarycommons.com/
| robot-wrangler wrote:
| IANAE, but besides things like the threatened oligarchs and taxes
| and government-monopoly on the legal use of force.. raw materials
| and imports/exports would seem to be an even more basic problem
| for an optimist that thinks the first big 3 issues can be worked
| around. That's why I think the dutch circular economy[1] is so
| interesting. Hopefully someone much more informed could opine?
|
| It's definitely got a "degrowth" aspect involved and the captains
| of industry will not appreciate it. On the other hand, it's much
| less threatening to entrenched interests compared to a large
| group of people who are explicitly trying to just opt out of a
| system you're deeply invested in.
|
| [1] https://www.government.nl/topics/circular-
| economy/circular-d...
| netfortius wrote:
| MMT
| sharpshadow wrote:
| With the amount of money which is created and transferred today
| it would be a task for one day to lift a whole country out of
| poverty. 1 million into an savings account with 4% return would
| be roughly 3k per month.
| amai wrote:
| This is relevant to understand this experiment:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_currency#Other_diffe...
| juancn wrote:
| This has been done many times in many places.
|
| Argentina did it last in 2001 or so (several parallel currencies
| were issued by different provinces:
| https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuasimonedas -Spanish only-).
|
| When the central government fails, in many cases local
| governments attempt anything to keep functioning.
|
| It does work, but the cleanup is messy.
| gus_massa wrote:
| They work quite well for a short time, perhaps a few years.
| Jujuy (north west) and other provinces started with the bonds a
| few years earlier. The first 1 or 2 year the exchange rate was
| "1 bono (bond) = 1 peso", and everyone accepted them at face
| value.
|
| Then you couldn't buy fuel or meat with bonds, only with real
| pesos. And if you have to send money to a family member (like a
| son/daughter studding in other province) you have to exchange
| them with a cut.
|
| During the final year, the shops accepted them with a 30% cut,
| so it was like "1 bono = 0.70 pesos", and still were not able
| to use them to buy fuel, meat and other things.
|
| ---
|
| I think the last bond was the Patacon
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patac%C3%B3n_(bond) by the
| province of Buenos Aires, that is big enough and it was too
| close to the general collapse that it never lost the 1 to 1
| parity with pesos.
| kerblang wrote:
| Since the author brought up Nazi Germany... they did it too,
| same Great Depression. It's how they restarted factories and
| secretly rearmed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mefo_bills
| miroljub wrote:
| It's an example of what a responsible local government working in
| the interest of the local community could achieve.
|
| No wonder that the federal government did all they could to shut
| down this experiment. It was too dangerous to have an example of
| actually functional governance.
| bbminner wrote:
| Seriously though, i doubt that "the rich across the globe"
| conspired to ban emergency currencies. I'd be curious to see a
| more in depth analysis of what are factors driving such local
| economies vs centralized currencies.
|
| Is it precisely that the currency could not be exported outside
| the local region - that made it a barter tool vs an investment
| tool - that made it less affected by such external events as
| great depression?
|
| What was the central government fearing? I'm sure there's a
| reason why it might be a less than ideal situation. Maybe because
| it is effectively a financial pyramid (more so than the primary
| currency) - a bunch of local govt making their local currencies
| with unclear unregulated printing schedule could result in many
| people not assessing their real purchasing power adequately?
| ranprieur wrote:
| This article fails to mention why the currency circulated so
| fast. It was depreciating: it was defined as gradually losing
| value, so hoarding didn't work, and the people with money had a
| strong incentive to spend it. The article makes it sound like
| these currencies worked because they were local. They worked
| because they depreciated, and it's possible to do this on a
| national level.
|
| Other writings about this: A book chapter, The Currency of
| Cooperation: https://ascentofhumanity.com/text/chapter-7-02/
|
| And a short piece about Brakteaten money:
| https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Brakteaten_Money
| em-bee wrote:
| _it was defined as gradually losing value_
|
| isn't that the same as a high inflation rate?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Free geld is a deflatory value, if you don't produce 1% of
| all value monthly there is less currency available, which
| means less currency has to cover same assets.
|
| But each month you are being taxed, on your liquid assets.
| mihaic wrote:
| Modern inflation punishes wage earners much more than capital
| earners, as the second category is closer to the money
| printing machine, and benefit better from it.
|
| A deflationary policy would hit capitalists a lot more than
| wage earners, since it's basically a wealth tax.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _They worked because they depreciated, and it 's possible to
| do this on a national level._
|
| It's quite easy. Hi from Argentina!
|
| Now the inflation is only 3% mom, but 2 years ago it used to be
| 10% mom.
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| The article mentions cathedral projects that issued their own
| local currencies. I guess they must have backed it with gold or
| silver, or some collection of valuable things donated to fund the
| cathedral?
|
| The article really is light on technical details that would help
| one to understand how these local currencies worked.
| luc4 wrote:
| It seems like the article is missing the central point -- namely
| that the currency was depreciating monthly, providing an
| incentive to spend it as quickly as possible.
| James_K wrote:
| For those interested, this is a generally and expression of
| Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
|
| The essential conclusion is that most places with hyperinflation
| (Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, etc.) where really suffering supply
| shocks (reparations, farming collapse) and so you actually can
| just print money, as long as you're using it to get people
| working and those working people produce greater value through
| their work than they are paid in printed money.
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