> To our modern sensibilities, this is a wildly invasive policy.
is it? not really
cutting the "value" of money in half always had been a important emergency tool countries had and sometimes used
and "moving" half of the value into a found which even pays out some years later is tbh. quite a fair way to do it (instead of just literally halving the money value permanently)
Fixing inflation is simple, people keep voting for it to not be fixed, so the inflation remains and gets worse.
The uniquely invasive aspect is forcing people to spend half their money to buy bonds. That doesn't happen very often.
It reminds me of "trillion dollar coin".
In both cases, the average person loses their buying power.
> quite a fair way to do it
Are your parents retired? Ask them if they think this was fair.
it's fair compared to the standard solution of fully cutting the value in half making everyone lose half their money for good or the other alternative of politicans not making necessary unpleasant decisions and in turn making everyone lose their savings, rent and more through a hefty inflation
is it grate, no, obviously not
but it probably the best thing they could do, or at lest relatively close to it
like ware economics are tricky as while they boost economy, especially on paper, they also hollow out a countries economical foundation and avoiding a huge crash when transitioning to peace economy is really really hard
I mean why do you thing the US government helped rebuild (west) Germany after WW2? Good will? German immigrants insisting on it? Maybe on personal level, but not really on governmental decision making level. But what it did was to help them avoid a huge post war economy crash by directing overproduction/monetary value from the US into west Germany. (It also helped in the cold war to not have a weak potentially failing state at the border to the Soviet union, helped geopolitical, and gave them a very huge influence in Europe for decades to come, much much more then they otherwise would ever have been able to get. So a win win win for everyone involved. Still moving monetary value from the US out of it to avoid a huge post ware economy crash was a huge part of it. Through you could argue the US is permanent stuck in a partial war economy and as such their move from war economy wasn't to peace economy but to partial war economy and as such less dangerous, but that is a totally different topic.)
Not everything which is necessarily and in context of the issues of a specific time one of the more fair solutions is fair in other times or good, or liked. But taking things out of context never helped.
Yes it is. It's the biggest wage theft in history.
if it's the biggest then what with the cases where monetary value was cut in half without giving anything back? No bonds no nothing.
Because that would have been on of the alternatives.
With another being to not do anything and everyone losing as much or more due to inflation and a post war economy crash.
Did it suck badly, sure, obviously. But the alternatives weren't exactly better.