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March 2025
Walking outside in the sunshine, listening to 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler. Feix Somary, the Raven of Zurich is quoted quite a bit. Inspiring the picture above, Felix saw the first wave of globalization, beginning in the 1850’s, start its descent in the 1930s as the storm clouds gathered that would ultimately lead to World War II. His peers believed a government German veterans thought sold them out while they still fought in the trenches was a safe bet to still be making payments in 1986. With nearly a century of distance between us to clearly see their mistakes as I walked with my headphones on, I tried not to judge them too harshly, instead focusing on the lessons learned and what Somery saw in real-time that his peers did not and decided to guard against. The first lesson so far is Somary looked at the international imbalance of payments and looked for the weakest link in that chain, which was Germany, so he believed the crisis would likely begin there. The second lesson is to not believe something is impossible simply because it would seem madness from our point of view. Somery didn’t set an artificial zone of possible agreement (ZOPA) like so many of his peers seemed to do on what Germany and other countries would be willing to do or tolerate as they struggled with debt and negotiations. My guess is after the horrors of the first world war, many very smart men couldn’t believe the ZOPA for other men would include a willingness to wage another industrialized war on a global scale. Somery, for whatever reason, seems to believe it was possible, no matter how destructive it would be.
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