Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/117

9] millions who already held savings in banks or owned mortgages or bonds.

In Europe, of course, the shift between contracting parties was even more rapid, because the depreciation of their moneys went on more swiftly. The German bondholder must have been essentially ruined and the reported repudiation of the Russian debt only completed openly a process that had, under the cover of inflation, already gone far.

The total unjust shift of income and principal (assuming the present high price level to continue) from shrinkage of dollars, pounds, francs, and other monetary yardsticks, since 1896, doubtless exceeds a hundred billion dollars, half or more being during the war. Almost every year untold billions of dollars' worth of social injustice is endured.

One ultimate result (except so far as a reverse movement may affect the matter) will have been, in effect, to extort the major cost of the war from widows and orphans, colleges, and hospitals, savings-bank depositors, salaried men, and wage earners. These are those with relatively "fixed incomes."

9. Uncertainty

"Fixed incomes"! What a mockery inflation and the consequent depreciation of the dollar in its purchasing power make of that phrase ! We who, through our laws, guarantee the inviolability of contracts and compel trustees to protect their wards by investing trust funds in such securities as bonds, permit, in fact sometimes cause by legislation, the loss, it may be, of half of these "inviolable" funds.