Chapter 5 shows that German housing programs reached a turning point in the mid-1970s. Initially, these programs reinforced the postwar export-oriented growth regime by alleviating housing shortages and creating low-cost housing that limited wage demands and inflation. However, as housing shortages abated, policymakers started criticizing them for contradicting the growth regime by increasing public debt, diverting capital from manufacturing, and fueling inflation. Unlike American policymakers who expanded housing support in response to post-Keynesian challenges, German policymakers began scaling down housing programs. By the late 1980s, they had gradually reduced large-scale rental housing programs. At the same time, they protected homeownership support, including through Chancellor Helmut Kohl's 1986 tax reform, not as a growth strategy but as policies for family support, wealth creation, and old-age security. However, key actors in the German growth regime critiqued homeownership programs for limiting labor mobility, inflating prices, and shifting capital away from manufacturing. For the time being, German politicians prioritized political factors and ignored macroeconomic critiques.

Exploring the economic ramifications of climate change, this chapter features insights from financial experts such as Sara Jane Ahmed, Managing Director and V20 Finance Advisor of the CVF-V20 Secretariat. It discusses the adverse effects on GDP growth, inflation, debt, and credit ratings, particularly in vulnerable economies. The chapter highlights the crucial role of financial markets, insurance, and climate finance in addressing these challenges. Innovative financing solutions such as Green Bonds and pre-arranged and trigger-based financing, including loss and damage finance, are explored as means to build economic resilience. The importance of sustainable economic policies and international cooperation is emphasised, with case studies from countries successfully integrating climate resilience into their economic planning. The chapter calls for increased investment in climate adaptation and mitigation to safeguard economic stability and promote sustainable development.

This chapter examines the military and economic centrality of granary networks to the Nationalists’ war effort. The centralization of land tax and its collection in kind restored the granary’s historic importance as the storehouse of state wealth. However, the chapter moves away from the dominant portrayal of granaries as economic stabilizers and disaster relief mechanisms to emphasize their strategic significance for an agrarian state at war. In examining the government’s establishment of a national grain reserve scheme and its construction of granary networks throughout its territories, the chapter presents the granary as an integral part of wartime economic policy and military logistical organization. It also studies the amassing of grain reserves in southwestern Yunnan for the Chinese Expeditionary Force after the fall of Burma, a significant but forgotten effort. Unlike most studies, it pays close attention to day-to-day operations, such as checking the quality of delivered grain and preventing spoilage. These everyday procedures are a window into how the demands of war concretely shaped civilian life and illustrate that granaries were key sites of state-society interaction.

This chapter argues that the risks of deflation and inflation and the financial crises at the start of the twenty-first century led to a “crisis,” with declining public confidence in money and the institutions that govern it, primarily the central banks. We describe the alternation of stability ad instability phases in the last half century. The postwar stability phase based on the Bretton Woods system ended in 1971. The end of the Great Inflation in the early 1980s opened the way to another stability phase, lasting until the Great Financial Crisis of 2008–09. A trait of this period was the liberalization and expansion of global capital markets. In the subsequent period – 2008 to today –the boom of digital and crypto finance took place. This period coincides with unprecedented activism of central banks aimed at supporting economic activity, fending off the risks of deflation and, in Europe, preserving the cohesion of the euro under threat from sovereign debts and a fragile banking sector. Lax monetary conditions, inflation, debilitated banks – these factors created an easier ground for competitors to challenge a traditional financial sector in a state of crisis.

This chapter provides an overview of the state of the art in constitutional and political theory with regard to the topic of central banks. Central banking, I show, is a highly political domain of policy making that raises thorny and under explored normative questions. I challenge accounts of central banking as involving limited discretion and distributional choices in the pursuit of low inflation, as well as the narrow range of normative questions that such accounts raise. I then ask what to make of central bankers’ political power from a normative perspective. As I argue, some delegation of important decisions to unelected officials is almost unavoidable, often desirable and by itself not undemocratic. I conclude by explaining that we should nonetheless be reluctant to allow for extensive central bank discretion by highlighting six crucial issues that are currently not sufficiently understood: the central bank’s actual level of autonomy from governments, the effectiveness of accountability mechanisms, the effects of depoliticizing money on the broader political system, the effects of democratic insulation on the effectiveness of central banks, the specific practices of deliberation within central banks and the scope for coordination with elected government.

This chapter looks at central bank digital currencies and aims to extend our understanding and the use cases for CBDCs in line with domestic and international economic policies. It examines central bank transactions and how money supply can be controlled and maintained using CBDCs. Over the years, the use of quantitative tightening has been limited due to the current functionality and utility of a country’s financial system. The “Klair Effect” is a form of quantitative tightening; it does not use the apparatus of interest rates to control the inflation rate; instead, a “delete button” to control the money supply on a central banks’ balance sheet.

Following military defeat in 1918, the Emperor abdicated and a Republic was declared. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed devastating terms on Germany. Social, economic, and political instability fostered the growth of radical ethno-nationalist movements. Once the great inflation of 1923 had been brought under control, and reparations and foreign relations were subjected to renegotiation, the political system began to stabilise. Berlin continued to expand as an industrial metropolis, with an improved transport network and major factories between the nineteenth-century red brick churches, schools, and municipal buildings. Immigration continued, including workers from the provinces and Jews fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe. A ferment of intellectual and artistic creativity contributed to ‘Weimar culture’, while Berlin also became noted for cabaret, night life, and challenges to traditional sexual mores. Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the German economy collapsed, precipitating further political instability. In a situation of near civil war, on 30 January 1933 President Hindenburg appointed the leader of the NSDAP, Adolf Hitler, as German Chancellor in a mixed cabinet.

Chapter 9, Where and how to place (June 8 - June 13) the question of the placement of the government loan comes front and center. Since the second BIS loan to ANB is conditional upon the placement of the bond loan, the National Bank is increasingly under pressure and the money supply has increased as it has rediscounted for the Credit Anstalt. The CA has no more solid collateral and ANB is losing foreign exchange at an increasing rate. Meantime, Hungary is also suffering from capital flight and the nervousness over contagion and the psychology of the crisis is increasing. The conflicts between the Austrian government and the central banks increases and information is still very hard to come by, all of which contributes to the uncertainty of the situation.

The early seventeenth century was a period of economic crisis throughout Eurasia. Finance was developed enough for heads of state to raise and equip massive armies, but not developed enough to pay these armies regularly. Within the context of the Mansfeld Regiment’s financial problems, this chapter describes mutiny, desertion, female labor, and the challenges of finding small change during a financial crisis. The Mansfeld Regiment’s operations depended on a network of military finance in central Europe and northern Italy which was broadly ramifying but imperfect and disorganized. The loan that was supposed to support this regiment was delayed; by the time the money arrived, the regiment’s superiors may simply have forgotten about them. The Mansfeld Regiment collapsed two years later.

Did the threat of war trigger the extraction-coercion cycle? In this chapter I use a panel of Latin America from 1830 to 1913 to test the effects of looming international threats on domestic taxation and internal conflict. It is believed that due to the availability of foreign loans and taxable imports, states in the region did not have to engage in extraction from the local population, nor did they have to coerce individuals to comply with such policies. I summarize this argument in the form of testable hypotheses and point to factors—naval blockades and sovereign debt defaults—that might have hindered access to such external resources. I then focus on militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and how they affected revenues, tariff levels, foreign loans, civil wars, coups, etc. My analyses show MIDs had a negative effect on tariffs and revenue and diminished the likelihood of a new loan—all results that contest the established conventional wisdom. Conversely, MIDs are associated to currency depreciation—a domestic-oriented inflationary tax—and domestic conflict—in particular, civil wars and coups. The chapter shows war did trigger the extraction-coercion cycle.