Headline Feb 04, 2015/ ''' JUST SOUL-SEARCHING ''' -O'' LORD! '''

''' JUST SOUL-SEARCHING ''' -O'' LORD! '''

JUST TWO YEAR AGO   -something very rotten happened in Italy and this is what one irate and shocked reader from Washington, DC,  wrote:

''SIR : The racist comments aimed at Italy's first black minister Cecile Kyenge, underscore the need for some serious soul-searching within Italian society.

Last year a monument was unveiled in Affile, just east of Rome, honouring Rodolfo Graziani, the ''Butcher of Ethiopia''. 

Graziani was Mussolini's henchman in Ethiopia during the  1930s. 

He showed no regard whatsoever for human life, ordering the massacre of thousands and overseeing the annihilation of entire communities. Even remote monasteries were not spared.

Dedicating memorial to a brutal fascist like Graziani is a disgrace. I hope a new generation of Italians will rectify this sad situation.''

Thousands of you here in Pakistan, simply mob me, to know  'what the hell did the O''Captain, Imran Khan,  attempt?  And what exactly did he set out to change?'. 

All I am willing to say is that O''Captain had and has : *Standing Room Only*. Lethal alignments, as I wrote, are not easy to unfreeze. 

Pakistan, the developing world, the world at large will only change for the better, and fast enough, if the students think through.

IN 1923,  -O'' OH Dear, dear me,   the German currency plummeted from 7,500 

Reichmarks  to the dollar  to a rate of  2.5 trillion.

Yes, the figure is 2.5 trillion Reichmarks to the dollar.

Germans are terrified of inflation  -and their colleagues in the euro zone, understand this, though mostly they ignore it as they try and steer their way out of the euro crisis.

Greece and Spain are just warming up.

By the end of  ''The Downfall of Money''   it is clear why these fears are so deeply embedded. At the root of the trauma lie the events of 1923.

This is not just a story of financial mismanagement. The dice were loaded against Germany as soon as it became clear, late in 1918, that it would lose the first world war.

As often happens, the winners wrote the history and set the terms for peace.

The Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919 but not finalised until 1921, was designed by the allies  'to suck dry'   what was left of Germany.

Worse still, France entered and occupied Germany;s industrial heartland, the Ruhr and Rhine, in January 1923, making it even harder for Germany to keep up its reparation payments.

Add to that a weak central government, threatened daily by extremists on the left and right, and it is remarkable that the world's second-biggest economy didn't disintegrate.

Frederick Taylor, who has written several books on this era, is careful to blame no one  -except perhaps the French. He is quick to offer parallels with the recent financial crisis- 

When many governments turned to quantitative easing {buying assets with newly created money}. to avoid recession or even depression.

Living in hyperinflationary Germany was very hard, unless you had a good supply of dollars. 

For civil servants, whose salaries never kept up, and savers, whose holdings shrank to nothing, it was slide into poverty and worse.

Manual labourers were better rewarded than white-collar workers. Landlord earned a pittance in rent. Pensioners starved. House-buyers had a better time of it; at least their mortgages shrank to nothing.

For the quick-witted it was a game of barter and raiding the countryside where most people were at least not starving. 

Two million migrated back to the land from German towns.

*Fat cats thrived by trading property and black-market goods and so did a handful of industrialists*.

The Honour and Serving of the  Operational Research  continues. Thank You for reading  -and maybe thinking?  And see ya on the following one.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Germany. See Ya all on !WOW!   -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' The Angst '''

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless