NOUGHTS AND THEIR CROSSES IN GERMANY.

Otaki Mail, 7 January 1924, Page 3

NOUGHTS AND THEIR CROSSES IN GERMANY.

Coming fresh to this orgy of black noughts into which German mark currency has sunk, I begin to think that there is witchcraft in a row of ciphers.

These new German notes with their interminable strings of zeros are most confusing things 'to handle. It is so hard to judge the length of their tails at a glance. One needs the eyesight of a sharpshooter to distinguish instantly between one piece of coloured paper printed 5000000 "and another of similar size and colour marked 500000000; yet the first is only worth a penny and will not even buy a newspaper, while the latter is for the moment worth about 10s, and will just about pay for your dinner.

Yesterday I gave a man from whom I bought a box of matches 100 million marks instead of 10 million. If it had not been for the speed with which he disappeared, I should never have noticed that it was the equivalent of Is 8d instead of 2d that I had handed him. But the new German notes of innumerable numerals and infinitesimal worth are just as unfamiliar to the German as to the foreigner. It is only 'within th'e last few weeks that the virus with which successive German Governments have inoculated their currency has broken out in this eruption of noughts. Everyone who receives a payment has to scrutinise each note carefully to ascertain its value, and since large payments are made with packets of notes literally several inches thick, the delay in places such as post offices and banks is considerable.

Moreover, profiting by the general financial anarchy, all sorts of authorities besides the German Government have been issuing notes that look very like those of the National Reiehsbank.

Municipalities and big trading concerns have flooded the Ruhr and Rhineland with this private paper-money. forcing it upon their employees and customers as wages or in change. It has been good business for them, since between the time they issued and the timo they will redeem the sums the notes stand for have sunk to oneliundrcdth part of their original value, so that such concerns have obtained at a discount of 99 per cent, the services or commodities thev thus purchased. When I arrived in DusseJdorf a week ago and began to change English money I found the pound was worth 825 millions, 1050 millions, and 1500 millions of marks in three places within two hours of time and two miles of distance of each other, all these rates being offered by official money-changers, not by private individuals. To keep ahead of the continual "slump," retailers advance their prices, by rule-of-thumb. The hotel bookstall-keeper told me that an English weekly paper, published at a shilling, was 250,000,000 marks. "I have no small change, nothing less than a billion," I replied. "I will pay for it when I come downstairs again.'' Half an hour later he Said: "The price is now 300 millions; it's after twelve o'clock."

By the rate of exchange at which I had cashed pound notes earlier that day, this made the cost in English money of a shilling magazine work out at four shillings. The shopkeepers keep elaborate tables like logarithms, by which they work out the prices of their goods afresh for each succeeding customer. The process involves complicated pencil calculations, and a short-sighted tradesman who has forgotten most of his arithmetic is soon reduced to exasperation and despair. Yet there is no perceptible declinein the general standard of livinz as the mark-ciphers go on spawning: the bits of paper that peaple exchange between themselves have more noughts on them, that is all. Meanwhile the first skvscrapor in Germany, already 12 ferroeonerete storeys high, goes on ri=inw opposite my hotel, and will be there, housing industrious Germans, when thS present paper-moner delirium is forgotten.— Of. W. P.