TheSwedishHistorian
Banned
I was reading this article on german war finance and it was quite illuminating.Germany can’t afford a peace where it doesn’t receive a massive reparations bucket of cash from the Entente. Border shifts, buffer states, colonies etc. is just window dressing.
"Germany’s debt grew tremendously during the war, but so did that of its enemies and allies. Its annual deficit hovered around 90 percent of total government expenditures in the second half of the war. Yet these deficits were only moderately higher than either France (80 to 85 percent) or Great Britain (70 to 75 percent). By the end of the war overall public debt of these three nations as a percentage of GDP had reached comparable levels.
Year U.K. France Germany 1914 61.3 54.8 73.5 1915 79.8 79.4 94.4 1916 75.0 86.6 92.7 1917 76.1 86.1 90.8 1918 69.2 80.0 93.8
Germany relied slightly less on taxation and slightly more on debt than did Great Britain. The Berlin money market absorbed less of its government’s short-term floating debt than did the money markets in London and Paris. Germany found it harder to raise funds abroad; its debt and the inflationary consequences of that debt remained firmly anchored in the domestic economy. And finally, its loan banks fostered a false sense that the German currency was still firmly anchored to gold, even though that ceased to be the case well before the end of the war.
Yet, as numerous historians have pointed out, inflation after the war could have been managed had the international climate been less acrimonious, the burden of reparations less severe, or the German leaders not pursued a policy of non-fulfillment. The mark, after all, stabilized against the dollar in late 1920 and early 1921, and inflation briefly reached an annual level of just 2 percent before the London reparations ultimatum of May 1921"
Seems to me like Germany could narrowly avoid hyperinflation and some of these problems as German problems partially came first in 1918 as a result of high reparations and Weimar leaders’ policies. Of course depends on the war agreement, reparations, and the like. 2 years of less warfare would spare germany a lot of costs.