Last week, on a sultry summer's evening in London, I had the pleasure of attending the re-launch party of Adam Fergusson's 'When Money Dies: the nightmare of the Weimar hyper-inflation'. This über-cautionary tale was originally published in 1975 by William Kimber & Co. Having fallen out of print, second-hand editions were changing hands, amongst those who could locate copies, for several hundred pounds each. It has now, happily, been republished by Old Street Publishing Ltd., for the very affordable price of £12.99. Suffice to say that every reader of this commentary is gently encouraged to purchase a copy.

That said, reading, and digesting, 'When Money Dies' is not particularly easy. In financial terms it is the equivalent of a snuff movie. For the sensitive of spirit, the experience is truly heart-rending. For this is not a fictional phantasmagoria; the extraordinary sequence of events within it genuinely happened, to real people.

As those schoolchildren who are still taught anything are told, the seeds of the Weimar hyper-inflation, like those of the Second World War, were sown in the ashes of the First World War, and most pressingly by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The Allies, and most notably the French, were determined to bleed Germany dry. Be careful what you wish for..

Germany could never hope to make good on the burden of Allied reparations forced on her. But few, Keynes perhaps apart, could have foreseen the extraordinary sequence of events that were to culminate in the economic firestorm of Weimar 1923, when sovereign allegiance to the printing press caused an entire currency and national economy to implode upon themselves. A few examples from Adam Fergusson may convey in some small way the surreal horror of what came to befall the largely unwitting populace, and political base, of Germany:

David Fuller's view Don't miss Tim Price's last two paragraphs.