In September, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain struck a take care of Adolph Hitler. Britain (and France) would enable Germany to grab the components of Czechoslovakia that have been inhabited by ethnic Germans (the Sudetenland), in trade for a promise to not make any additional advances on the nation. Upon returning house, he declared that he had insured “peace for our time.” Just a few months later, Hitler grabbed all of Czechoslovakia.
In my e-book entitled The Midas Paradox, I cited a NYT report available on the market response to the Munich Settlement:
“From a strictly market viewpoint the news of the decision of the Czech Government to capitulate to the demands that it cede the Sudeten area to Germany was favorable. Prices, quite naturally, improved as the threat of war seemed to recede. But this was ‘good news’ with a difference; hardly the sort of good news to capture the imagination of individual traders and evoke a spirit of bullishness. Even in Wall Street, where the mental processes are supposed to be exceedingly realistic, there was a sufficiently powerful sense of the tragedy involved in Czechoslovakia’s surrender and the unhappy role that Britain and France played in bringing it about to dampen the normal speculative impulses.” (NYT, 9/22/38, p. 33)
This occurred a very long time in the past, and I think that in the present day only a few People perceive the results of appeasing a tyrant who guarantees that he simply desires a portion of a neighboring nation.
I used to be reminded of this market response once I learn the following tweet:
