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Elon Musk. The inflation fraud of our time.
For a small number of people, inflation meant the opportunity to amass enormous wealth and economic power in just a few years. These were the “kings of inflation,” as Paul Ufermann called them in his 1924 collection of biographical portraits.
Ufermann’s list contains famous industrialists such as the steel magnates Otto Wolff and Alfred Ganz, Rudolf Karstadt, and a number of young profiteers such as Richard Kahn and Hugo Herzfeld, whose fortunes were almost exclusively linked to speculations on the stock market.
Yet towering above them all, the giant among the “kings of inflation,” was the industrialist Hugo Stinnes. He personifies like no other the nexus between inflation, industrial concentration, and wealth.
It is barely imaginable today what a wave of emotions, what deep hatred and boundless admiration, the mere mention of his name aroused.
His contemporaries were equally awed by the unbelievable pace at which Stinnes was able to amass his wealth within a few years. Not even in the ‘land of unlimited possibilities,’ America, had a fortune ever grown so rapidly.
As a vehement defender of laissez-faire capitalism, he was deeply concerned about the general anticapitalist climate that became prevalent during the tumultuous days of the fall of 1918.
The liberal credit policy of the Reichsbank and the devaluating mark made industrial concentration, both vertically and horizontally, very attractive financially and led to “a degree of concentration . . . in just a few years that would have required decades before the war.
Yet his entrepreneurship can only partially explain Stinnes’s economic success. While other industrialists, especially in heavy industries, also profited from the increasing currency stock , nobody understood the mechanism of inflation as well as Hugo Stinnes.
He ruthlessly took advantage of credits, often from government and other official sources, and successfully speculated in the progressing expansion of the German mark.
Stinnes never denied that he welcomed the inflation as an effective means to expand his industrial empire, and he legitimized his action by pointing out that the creation of employment through a booming inflationary economy had precedence over price stability.
In those days, the name Stinnes often cropped up in the news. The way people talked about him, the envy I sensed in Herr Bemberg’s voice when he mentioned his name, the cutting scorn with which Herr Schutt condemned him (“Everyone keeps getting poorer, he keeps getting richer”)
His contemporaries grew justifiably suspicious that his secret influence reigned almost everywhere. The fear of a “Stinnes-ization” of Germany was widespread, especially during his ultimately futile attempts to take over the German railway system.
(Hyperloop anyone ?)
(Hyperloop anyone ?)
On the other side of the political spectrum, the influential conservative journalist Maximilian Harden greeted Hugo Stinnes as a great savior. In his flattering, somewhat overbearing portrait of Stinnes he records some popular voices:
“All over the world, [he has] houses, real estate, industrials, partnerships.
He owns half of East Prussia, a large part of Southern Sweden. . . . He’s going to modernize and complete France’s canal system .
He owns half of East Prussia, a large part of Southern Sweden. . . . He’s going to modernize and complete France’s canal system .
During the last years of his life Hugo Stinnes had become a cultural icon occupying a space in the popular imagination that transcended his actions as a brilliant and ruthless industrialist.
His larger-than-life stature, the many legends and fictional accounts circulating about him, lent him a dark and mysterious aura. He invited projections and fantasies about an omnipotent man with control over the inflationary economy.
In response, envious fantasies of power and wealth mixed with ideological and political assessments from both the left and right. Thus the persona, the “myth” of Hugo Stinnes created a complex discursive space that was an integral part of the culture of the inflation.
