Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Caveat Emptor: Coping with Sovereign Risk Under the International Gold Standard, 1871-1913
- 2 Conduits for Long-Term Foreign Investment in the Gold Standard Era
- 3 The Gold-Exchange Standard: A Reinterpretation
- 4 The Bank of France and the Gold Standard, 1914-1928
- 5 Keynes’s Road to Bretton Woods: An Essay in Interpretation
- 6 Bretton Woods and the European Neutrals, 1944-1973
- 7 The 1948 Monetary Reform in Western Germany
- 8 The Burden of Power: Military Aspects of International Financial Relations During the Long 1950s
- 9 Denationalizing Money?: Economic Liberalism and the “National Question” in Currency Affairs
- 10 International Financial Institutions and National Economic Governance: Aspects of the New Adjustment Agenda in Historical Perspective
- Index
7 - The 1948 Monetary Reform in Western Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Caveat Emptor: Coping with Sovereign Risk Under the International Gold Standard, 1871-1913
- 2 Conduits for Long-Term Foreign Investment in the Gold Standard Era
- 3 The Gold-Exchange Standard: A Reinterpretation
- 4 The Bank of France and the Gold Standard, 1914-1928
- 5 Keynes’s Road to Bretton Woods: An Essay in Interpretation
- 6 Bretton Woods and the European Neutrals, 1944-1973
- 7 The 1948 Monetary Reform in Western Germany
- 8 The Burden of Power: Military Aspects of International Financial Relations During the Long 1950s
- 9 Denationalizing Money?: Economic Liberalism and the “National Question” in Currency Affairs
- 10 International Financial Institutions and National Economic Governance: Aspects of the New Adjustment Agenda in Historical Perspective
- Index
Summary
The initial purpose for writing this essay was to disabuse many scholars in the United States of the idea that the monetary reform in Western Germany on June 20, 1948, was the work of Ludwig Erhard, at that time chairman of the Sonderstelle Geld und Kredit (Special Unit on Money and Credit) and director of the Economic Administration of the bizonal Wirtschaftsrat (economic council) appointed by the British and American occupation powers. That attribution is mistaken, called by many German analysts a “myth” or a “legend” (Sauermann 1979, 316). Christoph Buchheim has recently asserted that everything contained in the ultimate reform laws was included in a paper that Erhard wrote late in 1943 and early in 1944 (Buchheim 1993, 84), but we believe this stretches matters. Erhard himself is reported to have said, in response to claims that German experts had produced the reform, that “practically all suggestions made by German experts . . . have been rejected . . . by inexperienced and technically unqualified personnel.” This goes too far in the other direction.
Erhard’s role in June 1948 was in removing price controls and rationing, not in one fell swoop and completely, as sometimes alleged, and even he warned against such precipitous action in a speech to the Bizonal Economic Council on May 10, 1948 (Erhard 1963, 36). But legends have power in history; what was originally Allied monetary reform became, within a few years, German monetary reform (Wandel 1979, 321).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- International Financial History in the Twentieth CenturySystem and Anarchy, pp. 169 - 196Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
- 7
- Cited by