Is the United States the New Weimar Republic?

Recent economic moves by the Obama Administration raise eerie parallels between the U.S. economy and the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic. Can national socialism be far behind?

Weimar Germany has come to embody the hyperinflationary environment which followed World War I in Germany, proceeding the Great Depression the rest of the world encountered almost a decade later. This also allowed the rise of the Nazi Party in 1933.

Hyperinflation has become an increasing calamity that could erupt in the United States should the latest moves by the Fed go astray, or if the U.S. dollar suddenly lose its status as the world’s leading reserve currency.

Last Wednesday the Federal Reserve announced it’s plan to pump another $1 trillion dollars into the U.S. economy through the purchase of long-term government debt, a move the central bank has not done in 50 years—effectively creating $1 trillion out of thin air.

Calls from worldwide creditors for the Obama Administration to stabilize the economy, have been joined with the upcoming recommendation to the United Nations from Currency specialist Avinash Persaud for the world to drop the U.S. dollar as the primary reserve currency and establish a highly
complex new reserve instrument. In a Special Report titled “Manning The Barricades” the Economist Intelligence Unit states, “US policy will be the main determinant of which model emerges. However, the U.S. can no longer be viewed as an unambiguous champion of unfettered globalisation and associated international political processes.”

Comparisons have been made before. In a 1995 article titled “American Weimar,” Steve Erickson wrote, ” America wearies of democracy… [We] are so disengaged from democracy we never vote at all, and those of us who vote not to thoughtfully resolve complicated issues but to express our rage.”

What is clear now is that President Obama was voted into office on a wave of ‘Hope” and “Change,” reinvigorating the potential of what an energized American Public can again find compelling about the political stage. Should he fail or should the economy collapse entirely, the U.S. should prepare for democracy to go the way of Weimar Germany. But Americans never think that could happen to them.