Caveat:
If your tweet happens upon my timeline and i have an opinion about it I’ll not hesitate to share it, albeit civilly and I’ll expect civility in your response. If, however you shed your decorum, I will also not hesitate to retort in same demeaning manner …
Germany, 1948. The Reichsmark is worthless. Cigarettes function as currency. Factory output sits at half its 1936 level, and the Allied occupation runs a price-control regime so absurd that farmers feed grain to livestock rather than sell it at the dictated price. Then Ludwig Erhard walks into a radio studio on June 20 and tells the German people the controls are gone. He did not ask the occupation authorities first. He told General Lucius Clay afterward that he hadn't altered the regulations, he had abolished them.
What followed embarrassed every Keynesian planner watching from Washington and London.
The Deutsche Mark replaced the Reichsmark at brutal terms: roughly 100 old marks for 6.5 new ones. Hard money, scarce by design. The black markets emptied overnight because goods reappeared in shop windows the moment prices could speak. Industrial production jumped over 50 percent in the second half of 1948 alone. And here is the part the textbooks bury: through the 1950s, as the economy grew at better than 8 percent a year, the cost of living stayed remarkably flat. Germans got richer while prices held or fell. Productivity outran the money supply, which is exactly what's supposed to happen when a central bank keeps its greedy paws to itself.
Falling prices alongside roaring growth, rising real wages, and a currency people actually wanted to hold rewarded Erhard's Germany. Deflation is not the disease. It is the natural reward for producing more than you did last year.
The Bundesbank inherited this discipline and guarded the Mark with a stinginess that drove politicians to fury for forty years. That stinginess built the strongest economy in Europe. Then the same political class buried the Mark under the euro in 2002 and handed monetary policy to people who consider 2 percent annual theft a "target."
Erhard proved sound money and free prices rebuild a bombed nation in a decade. Every finance minister since has worked very hard to forget it.
I am currently reading meditations- Marcus Aurelius the doppelgängers in thoughts and experiences is astounding, considering it was written over 2000 years ago…
The kindest thing literature does is remind you that your peculiar little feelings have always existed. Someone, in some century, was equally confused by love, bored by society, tired of performing, and hungry for meaning.
@gimbakakanda Being a father is more common than being a World Cup champion… out of the eight men in my line of view 7 are fathers and only 2 still play soccer…
@hadizel Congratulations on successfully completing another lap around the sun, albeit through tough weather, however, wish you many more laps in calmer seas, and ruddier health …
The older I get, the more I realize you can reinvent yourself as many times as you need. New standards. New habits. New mindsets. New people. New career. It's never too late. You can change. Today, tomorrow, and as many times as it takes to create the life you want.
In 1879, a simple Egyptian peasant woman named Mubarka Khafaji from a village in Kafr El-Sheikh married a farmer, Ibrahim Atta, who worked for daily wages. Due to financial hardship, he divorced her even though she was in the final months of her pregnancy.
Mubarka moved with her mother and brother to Alexandria, where she gave birth to her son, Ali Ibrahim Atta. She made a firm decision to do everything possible to raise and educate him in the best way.
She had countless reasons to despair and grow bitter toward men, but she did not. She could have forced her son into child labor selling tissues at traffic lights, but instead she worked as a cheese seller in the streets of Alexandria to support him.
She enrolled her son Ali in the Ras El-Tin Primary School. After he completed primary education, his father came to take him away to make him work with only a basic certificate.
But Mubarka’s dreams were much greater. She secretly moved her son from the roof of her house to the neighboring roof and fled with him to Cairo, enrolling him in the Khedivial School in Darb El-Gamamiz. She worked for a family in order to fund his education.
Ali excelled in his studies and was admitted to medical school in 1897, graduating in 1901.
Fifteen years later, Sultan Hussein Kamel fell seriously ill, and doctors were unable to diagnose his condition. Dr. Othman Ghaleb suggested the name of Dr. Ali Ibrahim. He successfully performed a critical surgery, after which he was appointed as the Sultan’s chief surgical consultant and personal physician, receiving the title of "Bey."
In 1922, King Fouad I granted him the title of "Pasha."
In 1929, Dr. Ali Pasha Ibrahim became the first Egyptian dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Fouad I University (Cairo University). He later became the university’s president.
In 1940, he was appointed Minister of Health. In the same year, he founded the Egyptian Medical Syndicate and became its first president. He also served as a member of the Egyptian Parliament.
His mother was: An uneducated, rural, divorced peasant woman.
Yet she raised a son who changed history.
The reform of any society begins with a mother.
Salute to every mother who is a true school of life.