The great war:

debts that never die

Debts without Redemption reveals the financial structures behind the War - and their effect on our world today.

The Great War lasted only four years, from 1914 to 1918. However, while physical battle was over, the financial aftermath resulted in decades of instability and millions of economical victims. The almost unlimited spending of some countries also led to heavy international disputes about debt payments and, perhaps even more important, a dramatic shift of global wealth and power from Europe to the United States. Even today, the bill is not yet settled and almost certainly, it will never be.

What makes the first world war especially interesting and insightful lies in a number of factors. The financial mechanisms behind the first world war:

• Mark the maturation of monetary policy in an industrialized world where intercontinental barriers have become less prevalent

• Form a remarkable illustration of cultural differences in the funding and spending of public money.

• Brought forth new, creative, ways of funding large public projects, some of which are still used today.

• Set a new level of scale for international loans and long-term dependedness between countries. The effects of these international dependencies on further history can hardly be underestimated. For example, the relationship between the reparation payments and the german national sentiment, leading up to the second world war are widely acknowledged.

During the war, governments used all sorts of creativity to collect money to feed the inexhaustible war machine. This book explains how every government dealt with it in its own way, led by tradition, culture and personal choices of financial authorities. Even so, at the end of the war all of the involved countries were overloaded with debts; both to other countries, as well as to their inhabitants.

The problem of paying for the war was not tackled until after the war; when ‘the guns fell silent’, financial warfare just started. While populations suffered from hyperinflation, loss of property and unemployment, diplomats and bankers tried to untangle the Alexandrian knot of international reparation payments in luxurious conference spas fruitlessly. In the end Britain and France were at least as successful in evading financial obligations on, as was Germany in not fulfilling the heavy reparation payments that were imposed, rather than agreed.