Why did the germany economy collapse in 1929?
WWI made the US the world’s strongest economy. Much of the rest of the world had been ruined by the war but the very human reaction to the peace was an impossible attempt to return to 1914. This was temporarily achieved on borrowed money (mostly American) and the 1920s were a period of almost unprecedented prosperity. This led in the US to wilder and wilder speculation on the stock exchange. As was inevitable, the bubble eventually burst, in the fall of 1929. Americans (individuals and institutions) sought to solve their resultant cash flow problems by calling in their foreign loans, spreading the effects of the crash across the world. World trade contracted, with the price of a bag of Brazilian coffee, for example, falIing from $29 in 1929 to $17 in 1930 and $9 in 1931. In central Europe the most notorious bankrupcy was that of the Viennese CreditAnstalt in the spring of 1931, affecting finances throughout Austria and Germany. Mass unemployment and government instability spread worldw
