The Weimar Warning: Why History Is Repeating in America

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0:41Grab tasty flatbreads and their new balsamic chicken salad in the prepared foods department. Keep things fresh with organic red cherries, strawberries, and peaches at their peak. And stock up on bug sprays and sun care must-haves. Make your summer sizzle at Whole Foods Market. This is the Rich Dad Radio Show. The good news and bad news about money. Here's Robert Kiyosaki. Hello, hello, hello. Robert Kiyosaki, the Rich Dad Radio Show. We're broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona. It's either heaven or hell. And right now it's heaven. White people live here. And we have a very important program today because, as the saying goes, it's a very wise thing that history proves people don't learn from history.

1:29And we make the same stupid mistakes over and over again. And our guest today is Matthew Seaman, and his specialty is the Weimar Republic. Now, the trouble is most students have no idea what the Weimar Republic was. and it's a very important subject because we're doing the same thing that was done back in the 1920s so the Weimar Republic was an interesting time but it was set up from I was taught Matthew disagrees with this but in 1918 there's a Treaty of Versailles the Treaty of Versailles was when Germany finally surrendered from World War I And the Axis powers, or the Allied powers, should I say, got together like France, America, England, forced the Germans to pay for the war.

2:26And the Germany was broke. So they paid for the war by printing money. And God bless us, America is doing the same thing today. So the reason I have Matthew on is very important. We learn from history. And most people have no idea what the Weimar Republic was or the Treaty of Versailles. Yet, they're very important times because there's a similarity. History may not be the same, but it's rhymes, and it's rhyming today. So, Matthew, welcome to the program. Looking forward to talking to you about the Weimar Republic. Yes. Thank you, Robert. Looking forward to talking about this subject as well. Yeah.

3:10Why is the Weimar Republic so important? Right. So generally, if anybody is familiar with the Weimar Republic, they think about the hyperinflation that took place mainly from 1922 to 1923. And popular references to this time period might show pictures of your average middle class German citizen carrying around wheelbarrow barrels full of money. and we've of course seen other hyperinflations in history but not quite like with a developed country such as germany and the academic consensus i would say for the most part is that economists would say the hyperinflation what was partly triggered and maybe even mostly triggered by article 231 of the versailles treaty which stated that germany was to was chiefly responsible for World War I, starting the conflict, and that the Allied powers, so the U.S., France, and Britain got together and agreed that Germany should pay reparations for the damages inflicted on the Allied powers and other nations as well.

4:21Right. So the 1980 Treaty of Versailles was the Allied powers got together and said, Germany, you pay for the war. simply as that. And Germany didn't have any money. So they said, well, let's just print as much money as we can. We'll pay for the war. Now, this is the most important part, the reason I wanted Matthew on this program. The Weimar Republic led to the rise of a man named Adolf Hitler. So the history isn't the same, but it rhymes. So Hitler then took us into World War II. 1939 with the attack on Poland. And they lowered the interest rates again in America. And it's going to set up hyperinflation in America now.

5:11So exactly what happened back with Matthew is a student of the Waimar Republic, which is called the American Republic. Because we're going to start lowering the interest rates in America, they're going to print. And when you print, you have hyperinflation. And when you have hyperinflation, the rich get richer. The poor middle class get poorer. So that's why I was very excited about Matthew at the New Orleans Investment Conference on mining. I own gold mines and silver mines. And we're doing the same thing, right? I mean, this is a correlation between what happened in the Weimar Republic, too much printed money.

5:54The story is the favorite story I heard from Weimar Republic was this person goes to the supermarket with a wheelbarrow full of money, and they stole the wheelbarrow and left the money. I don't know if that's true or not, but it makes me laugh anyway. And we're doing the same thing today. So Matthew, take away. Tell us what you know. Absolutely. I agree. In fact, there are anecdotal accounts from memoirs of the time where some people had chosen to use the wheelbarrow sizes of money to heat their homes rather than use it to pay for coal because it was more efficient just to heat your home, burning a billion paper marks worth of money.

6:40And it did have quite a negative pessimistic effect, especially for the holders of German bonds, because one of the reasons why I like to start with discussing the Weimar hyperinflation all the way back to the start of World War One was that the German government had decided to pursue a fiscal policy that was remarkably different from England and the other allied powers. because England, although it did not totally rely on taxation to finance its armaments, industry, and other expenditures that it needed to fight the war against Germany, Germany almost solely relied on borrowing. And the banking law that had been instituted back in the 19th century to create the Reichsbank had stated that for all the notes that the Reichsbank issued to the public, a third of them had to be backed by gold, right?

7:33And that was the case up until 1914. I mean, there were other banks in Germany that had legal authorization to issue currency, but it was very minuscule compared to the Reichsbank's ability to print base money, what economists would call base money. But in 1914, at the start of the war, what the German finance ministers and the government decided was to change the law that was requiring all its notes in circulation to be backed by at least, at least a part of them to be backed by gold, to creating subsidiaries of the German Reichsbank that issued loan bureau notes. And so that was a tricky way for the government to get around having to back all its notes in circulation with at least a third of gold.

8:19So I would say the first step, at least in the general history of the hyperinflation, to where the government created money that was backed less and less by physical commodities and hard assets. So are you saying that the Reichsmark, which was the currency of the time, was backed by gold initially? It was partly backed by gold. So the Reichsbank issued the Reichsmarks, which was the currency of Germany, and at least a third of the notes, you know, those Reichsmarks in circulation had to be backed by gold. But it didn't have to be any more, but the very least a third. So, of course, what happened in the days leading up to the war and during the war, the German government had withdrawn a lot of the gold that was held by the public and they suspended convertibility.

9:04So normally you would be able to go to the Reichsbank or a local bank and be able to take your Reichsmarks and they'd be convertible to gold on demand. But that convertibility was suspended. And on addition to. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. So in 1971, President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, which allowed America to print as much money as we want. And today, I would say America is one of the biggest debtor nations in history, where$38 trillion in debt and Chairman Powell of the Fed, which is a Marxist organization, just allowed us to lower interest rates again. And so we're going into QE, quantitative easing, again.

9:53And again, when you lower interest rates and you print money, the rich get richer. Poor middle class get poorer. The reason the rich get richer is if you own gold and silver or land right now or income-producing property, the value of the property goes up, gold and silver. But so does the price of chicken and eggs. and so the poor middle class who don't have many assets or tangible assets, life gets more expensive. And that's exactly what's going on today. So Charlie Kirk, who was just murdered, his last few weeks before he was murdered, he kept saying the word affordability, affordability, affordability.

10:39and he was extremely concerned about the growing gap between the rich and poor and hyperinflation. And Chairman Powell lowered the interest rates again, which means they're going to print more money. So it does repeat. It's not carefully, but it rhymes. And we don't learn from that. So what else did you, what else happened during the Weimar Republic is a very important time. Absolutely, yeah. that's why I started with the 1914 to 1918 period when World War I was taking place because the German government decided to issue war bonds and the primary purchasers of the war bonds during the war were the middle class.

11:24It was the educated upper middle class of Germany that was known for being ardent savers. And of course, the previous 40 years or so going back to the time when Germany was finally reunified from small local city states into one country, there was modest inflation of, I can tell you what their equivalent CPI would be. But the people who had grown up in the reunified Germany, they had worked hard to make a living and they put savings away for retirement. And of course, it all went to nil towards the latter years of the hyperinflation. And the primary losers of the German Reichsbank policies and finance minister policies that were pursued was the middle class and those who were creditors to the government in other institutions as well.

12:17And the winners, of course, were also the people who actually held real assets. There's a individual named Hugo Stinez who had become tremendously wealthy in the latter days, the hyperinflation by buying untold amounts of property and apartments, shipbuilding companies, so on and so forth. And there was definitely a resentment that had built up between, you say the younger generations for us, that would be millennials or Gen Z, perhaps Gen Alpha coming up. And they're equivalent to the older generations that had saved and worked hard. But But the younger people who had started investing in stocks that were available at the time, which was very common, particularly in 1920 and 1921, they did well.

13:04People who worked hard their whole life, they ended up growing in jealousy and greed and just getting upset that their neighbor who hasn't learned the hard lessons of life is doing really well. So we're repeating. Yes. hyperinflation. Some of the pictures I've seen is kids put together some Reichmark as a kite, and they're flying this kite made of Reichmark, millions in Reichmark. Another picture is a woman using the Reichmark to keep her house warm by burning it. And again, my concern is it's going to happen again. History may not repeat, but it rhymes. So again, in 1971, Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, which made the dollar debt, and then they could print as much as they wanted.

14:00And what Nixon violated was the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, which ended World War II. So the Reichmark, the Weimar Republic, and then the treaty, I mean, the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944 was to stop that shit. So when Nixon comes to office, because we're fighting wars on two fronts, we're fighting the war on poverty, and we're fighting the Vietnam War, and so the only way we can pay for it is take the dollar off the gold standard and decide to print. And we're there again, right, Matthew? Yes, and of course, this was the year prior to an election year, 1972, when Nixon tried to pull the, He did pull the original Bretton Woods standard by taking the dollar off a gold exchange.

14:51So I think you're spot on about that. And there's more parallels we'll get to, I'm sure, later in the show about how the Reichsbank managed its discount rate and started discounting private debt on top of treasury bills and so on and so forth, much to at least similar in some ways to what the Federal Reserve policy is concerning monetary operations. Yeah. So we come back, we're going to ask Matthew, who was an expert in the Weimar Republic. And the reason the Weimar Republic is so important is it gave rise to a man named Adolf Hitler. And when Adolf Hitler came to power, in other words, they ended World War I.

15:31But the Weimar Republic gave rise to Hitler, started World War II. And millions and millions and millions and millions of, specifically Jews, were murdered in concentration camps. the Holocaust. And we're doing the same thing. We're doing the same thing again. So when we come back, we'll be talking to Matthew Thiemann, expert on the Weimar Republic. What a person could do today to not be driving around with a wheelbarrow full of U.S. dollars. We'll be right back.

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17:11Welcome back, Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Radio Show. It's not really a radio show anymore, but it's a podcast. But our guest today is Matthew Seaman. He's an expert and a student of the Weimar Republic, which I said the important thing about the Weimar Republic was that they started printing money to pay for World War I, but it led to the rise of Adolf Hitler after the Weimar Republic. And then Hitler took us into World War II. And millions of people were murdered. Also, World War II started with Japan and Germany fighting the Allied powers. Chairman Powell, the Fed, just reduced interest rates again.

17:59They're going to print more money. So Matthew, when you look at this whole thing, first question is, how come a young guy like you is so interested in the Weimar Republic? You know, it's funny. Even before I made my decision on where to go for undergrad, I had always been interested in economics, coming across it from reading global conflicts like World War I and World War II. It just really fascinated me after seeing how resources were really the pivotal factor in determining who won and lost wars. And I want to understand how should resources in the global economy be properly allocated? Are there instances in history that tell us those critical lessons on what to do and what not to do?

18:49and what is it that makes capitalist nations much more successful than socialist nations and other economic ideologies and i am choosing to go to loyola and new orleans for undergrad because i realized that their economics faculty had a lot of austrian economists and uh you know it was a school of thought that i guess was gaining providence due to uh predictions made before the global financial crisis that there would be a housing crash. You could think of Peter Schrift and some other. 2008, which was, again, they didn't print money. They created derivatives, and derivatives fired off. And what a derivative is, is very simply, you get an orange.

19:35You cut the orange in half and you squeeze it. Orange juice comes out, and the juice is a derivative. and the problem with the derivative, which happened in 2008, they fired off, is the derivative is more potent than the original thing. So you take orange, orange juice, orange concentrate. That's what they were doing. And we're doing the same thing again today in 2025. So, Matthew, what does your crystal ball say about America as compared to the Weimar Republic? I mean, is there a similarity in your mind? Because you've studied both intensely. Yeah, I believe the parallels, again, are very striking on a cultural level, socially, economically.

20:22I brought up to you the growing tensions between the older populace and the younger workers. And that happened in more respects than one. I see a lot of parallels with the governance. now violence was rift especially right after world war one in germany because uh the german generals particularly paul von hindenburg and eric ludendorff they came up with something called the back myth and uh journey uh fair and square had lost the war uh it had ended on german territory and germany was just exhausted of of uh manpower and will to continue the war but the generals who came back and said that uh you know it was the uh greedy jews and uh other scapegoats who were really responsible for germany losing the war and there were outbreaks of violence and right within berlin the uh sitting leader of germany had to flee i believe it was to the neverlands right after the war and there was a uh a fight for control of the governance that had lasted you know somewhere between five or six months to where the uh individual socialists such as rules of luxembourg had tried to seize power and there were some socialists in fact who had came to uh to dominate the portions of the country such as in bavaria but there was a lot of murders and stabbings and uh even years after that there were political assassinations such as wolf rafenau who was the foreign minister of germany i mean violence was on the street everywhere and uh i mean in some ways that does remind me of america too you bring up charlie kirk who was uh murdered for what seems to be political beliefs and freely speaking his mind.

21:59So, yeah, I mean, the list goes on, of course, in other ways. But there was a pessimism about the future, and young people were very grasping for reasons to live aside from having to work and see their savings eroded and so on and so forth. And then, you know, I was looking at the, Yeah, they elected that guy, what's his name? He's the mayor of New York. He's basically a - It was Doran Mondani? Yeah, Mondani. And I was kind of looking at the analysis, who voted for him. And who voted for him was a lot of young women. He's a Democrat, socialist, communist, basically. So history is repeating. So why my republic led to Hitler?

22:51and this bust is leading to Mondami, does that correlate to you at all? I think so in some respects. Of course, this is highly contested, but Hitler did appear to be a socialist before he had joined the Nazi party. And even though you couldn't necessarily draw a straight line between the ending of the hyperinflation all the way to Hitler, It does appear to me that there was such a trauma that was built up from that last period of the hyperinflation that there was the trust in government was completely eroded. And the general public knew that the system that was in place in Germany for their economy was broken and their politics was as well.

23:38The government was designed differently in Weimar Germany than it is here in America. They didn't necessarily have a they didn't have a two party system. they had something called proportional representation where voters would line up to decide on a party they would vote for. And you could choose from the Social Democrat Party, which was the most popular party in the first election that was held in Weimar, Germany in 1919. They garnered about 37 percent of the votes, the Catholic Center Party and various upper parties as well. And they ended up having to form coalitions in government because as long as one party did not hold at least 50 % of votes, you had to come to some form of consensus on how to govern.

24:17But there were people who were far less leaning in politics in Germany who were working to form alliances with trade unions and form other coalitions that were detrimental to any success that the Weimar Republic could have. And I think that just firmly set in the fears that people had to where they wanted to trust someone like Hitler. They wanted to have a savior that could knock down and rebuild from a really broken system. And I sense the same from a lot of Americans today. You're saying Hitler was a savior. They thought that he was a savior, of course. He was anything but. but um the zeitgeist of the time was that the people thought you know hitler was the best solution and they they were absolutely hoodwinked and uh and totally deceived in thinking that um but you know when desperate times fall on people i mean i think mainly during the great depression and this is you know from germany they had the majority of their bank failures in 1931 But the person who was the chancellor, Heinrich Brünen, he tried to do the opposite of what the politicians and rulers had done in Weimar Germany during the peak of their hyperinflation years earlier.

25:42He tried to cut back on welfare spending, unemployment assistance, and so on and so forth. But the people wanted to have none of that. And I think they had been conditioned from… The people wanted socialism. Yes. And this is the part that kind of concerns me, is that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. What lessons are we missing from Matthew? Because you're the expert on the Weimar Republic. What lessons is the world not getting? Yeah, I mean, I think you've kind of already hit the nail on the head that we don't learn from history because we don't make the effort to read it and study it. And I think for a lot of the younger people who are still in schools, history is one of those dull and boring subjects that is really for people who are odd or weird or whatever.

26:42But history, even though it doesn't exactly repeat, as you said, we have those parallels in place in resemblances that could be a good gauge or a guide to what's in store for America in the future. and I'm not a prophet or anything. There's people within the debates on what the Federal Reserve is doing who say we're in danger of hyperinflation, which I think there's a substantial chance perhaps years down the road. I wouldn't put a date to it, of course, that that could happen or you'd have a deflationary depression. Either way, I think the outcome is the same for people who are caught with their pants lying down.

27:21The people we don't study in history, they're not going to see that these sort of things are on the horizon and they're going to be caught off guard so they didn't pay attention to the signs of the times. Yeah. The corollary or the relationship I see is that, you know, the woman or the man with a wheelbarrow full of Reichmark going to the store and somebody stole the wheelbarrow, left the Reichmark on the ground, or the person burning Reichmark to stay warm, or kids flying a kite made out of Reichmark. But today it's a little different. What it is is they say that living, for most Americans, I think our credit card debt is an average of$3 ,600 at 20 % interest.

28:05So the average American is like in trouble.

28:12And they said living paycheck to paycheck is a luxury. Today they live paycheck, credit card, paycheck. so it's cut in my i my seeing too much there i mean i see the same thing happening it's just they didn't have credit cards i don't think during the weimar republic but today we have credit cards so we don't see the people with wheelbarrows full of fake money yeah absolutely i think that the uh the fact that most payments are done electronically is uh a good way to mask um you know the gradual erosion of the dollar as a store of value. And, uh, you know, I, I, I agree with most people that the system is broken, but we need to be circumspect about, you know, any proposed solutions and be watchful about, you know, what is being peddled is, uh, orthodoxy or, uh, sound, sound monetary policy.

29:11Yeah. And one of the problems with printing money, it always leads to war. And we're on the verge of it right now. So anyway, Matthew, I want to thank you. Any final words to the, how do people follow you or get in touch with you or want to learn more about your studies with the Weimar Republic? Pay attention to history and pay attention to the details and be wary of anything that's being said. Be curious, diligent to find the answers for yourself and don't rely on someone else telling you what the answer is. So Matthew, I thank you. I thank you for contributing to the Rich Dad radio show and sharing your information.

29:54Well, you know, history proves that people don't learn from history. And I'm really concerned right now because I think we're going into hyperinflation right now with what happened last week with Jerome Powell and the Fed. So Matthew, I thank you. So where was that? Where's your where's your paper held or how do people get in touch of it? It's the Louisiana State Library. There's a digital copy. I can provide you a link after the show here. And that way people can access it in the comment section or description of the video. Yeah. So please go to get a check out, read it, learn from it, learn from history.

30:32when Matthew found out because what happened in the Weimar Republic was the rise of Adolf Hitler. And that cost a lot of people a lot of lives. So Matthew, thank you very much. And a blessing for your study. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you, Robert. Fascinating. Anyway, we're right back with a final word for myself on the Rich Dad Radio Show. We'll be right back. Thank you again, Matthew. Thank you.

31:06Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things. So why waste time sending important documents the old-fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want with Stamps.com. Print postage on demand 24-7 and schedule pickups from your office or home. Save up to 90 % with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust Stamps.com. Go to stamps.com and use code podcast to try stamps.com risk-free for 60 days. Hey guys, I found the only gift that dad wants this father's day gold belly. Gold belly ships the most iconic foods from the best restaurants across the country straight to his door for free.