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in some countries, false bills were far less a danger than the threat posed by real ones. Every German had suffered the damage done by printing presses’ spewing out billions of banknotes on the orders of the democratic Weimar Republic. Determining the first cause of that historic hyperinflation of 1923 is more than a theoretical debate of interest only to economists and their allied ideologues. Was it a deliberate move to cheapen Germany’s currency in order to promote the exports that would pay Germany’s punitive war debts? Was it designed to save workers’ jobs? Or to enrich the great corporations and property owners by liquidating their debts? Perhaps all of these. Currencies had also collapsed in the new states of Austria, Hungary, and Poland following the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I. During the ensuing panic, stable currency — even when it was false — was in frantic demand. In port cities, sailors coming off ships were mobbed with offers to buy their foreign currency. With each passing minute the local scrip was worth dramatically more or less, depending on violent monetary fluctuations that undermined society and trust in authority.
    In the interwar years, money therefore was rarely valued as a dependable standard of wealth as it had been throughout the rise of the bourgeoisie during the hundred-year peace that was shattered in 1914. Thereafter, no country stepped forward to serve as what economists call a hegemon, a conductor of the international orchestra, providing financial and physical security. Britain had filled that role during the Victorian age with its pound sterling and the Royal Navy, as America later would during the Cold War with the almighty dollar and the atomic bomb. But between the wars, money became a weapon. Trade could be manipulated by raising tariffs and devaluing currency to favor local products, thus seizing jobs and profits from other nations. Everybody accused everybody else, usually justifiably, of policies known as “beggar thy neighbor.”
    The Germans were only the first to flout the old rules with a competitive devaluation that would have been impossible under the prewar gold standard. They were followed by the French, who allowed their currency to cheapen against the dollar in the 1920s (incidentally attracting Jazz Age spenders to France and gold into French mattresses). America and Britain also engaged in a battle of wits, each trying to cheapen or strengthen its currency against the other’s. The odds were stacked in favor of America, which sat on a hoard of gold earned by the wartime sale of raw materials and arms to Europe, who had borrowed from Wall Street to pay for the war.
    Nevertheless, the British sought a richer pound as the lifeblood of their empire. In 1925 they went back on the gold standard, restoring the dollar value of the pound to $4.86 in order to maintain London as a financial center with a trusted currency that, in theory at least, could be exchanged for gold. As a result, British workers suffered while their counterparts in France and America thrived. In 1931, at the start of the Great Depression, the pound was finally knocked off gold and sank to $4.05. Even at that rate, British goods were too expensive. And a strong pound, easily exchanged with other currencies, made it the obvious target for counterfeiters. Why bother to print fake marks, francs, or even dollars when their value was so uncertain? British schoolboys, twisting the familiar mnemonic of volume and weight, chanted the almost mythological rhyme, “The pound’s a pound, the world around.” And for the wicked, the pound’s stability was a magnet.
    Hitler’s Germany, short of gold and foreign currency even before he took power in 1933, shrewdly managed trade under a financial genius with the curious name of Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht. (He dropped his two American names; perhaps his parents had been influenced by Goethe’s prophetic remark,
“Amerika, du