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The centerpiece of their July 1932 election propaganda, the Wirstchaftliches Sofortprogramm (the immediate economic program) laid out an alternative to austerity that looked an awful lot like the WTB plan. The pamphlet's first three points could not have been more anti-austerity: first, "unemploy…

[...] the German government's deliberate policy, designed to make the payment of reparations, especially after the French occupation of the Ruhr, all but impossible. [...] As Albrecht Ritschl put it succinctly, "Inflation proved to be a formidable weapon against reparations creditors, at least in t…

[...] in the absence of any significant liquidity-constraint, "when spending cuts are perceived as permanent, consumers anticipate a reduction in the tax burden and a permanent increase in their lifetime disposable income." This leads them to spend and invest more today because they perceive that "…

[...] what economists call moral hazard is what normal people call trust. You cannot eliminate the former without destroying the capacity for generating the latter. Without some degree of rule ambiguity and norms of reciprocity, trust cannot emerge. The EU's political project was built on trust, no…

The Treasury's argument, echoing Hume and Smith, was that to borrow money to finance spending, the government would have to offer better terms than those available elsewhere. This would have the effect of reducing overall investment by
"crowding out" private capital while increasing the debt for …