The value of the German currency these days is like a ship that, with a broken rudder, is abandoned to a storm on the high seas.
Helpless, obeying no will, the market currency is subject to every political vicissitude, every whim from this direction or that.
In a few short days we saw a dollar price of 9,200 marks, then of 6,200 and again of 8,000 marks.
The dollar value changed from 7,200 to 7,900 marks within a trading hour.
Every sign of an increased political strain on the situation from the West raises the dollar price by hundreds and thousands of marks. Subsequent periods of stagnation, mostly of a very short-term nature, allowed the market value to gain some breathing room again, until renewed worries about the currency exchanges next day drive up again up and up again.
Thus the mark currency shows the character of a disease in its last stage.
Slightly flaring hope always gives way to apathy that is all the more severe.
In fact, no temporary improvement in market value, which only makes us, who measure it in hundreds and thousands of dollar values, seldom aware of the insignificance of the converted amounts of fluctuation to sixteenths or thirty-seconds of the American denomination, can free us from the heavy and depressing skepticism which, in this preliminary stage before the Brussels conference, which, if it comes about, would simultaneously solve the reparations problem and the international debt crisis, was the violent fanfare of the French war council, the threat, tantamount to complete pressure, with the tearing up of Germany,
Whom the gods wish to destroy
In this way, France underscores its demands on Germany, which go beyond any possible measure, and its will to intervene deeply in German sovereignty and also in the German economy and its finely woven fabric.
There is no hope for Germany, no hope for Europe writhing in the aftermath of war, while a war council in Paris prescribes the program of the French delegation to this economic and financial conference.
What we heard from Paris in those years was the will and determination to destroy Germany.
Is it possible to hope that, before the decisive days in Brussels, a change similar to that which has long since taken place in England will take place in France?
bringing the transition from a political-chauvinistic treatment of the reparation question to an economic attitude?
Because according to all experience this hope has become infinitely small, the market value has slipped down to the desolate condition, the world economy and world finance have isolated themselves more and more from Germany and leave us in our helplessness to ourselves.