I’ve written a lot about inflation in this space. But sometimes, the most powerful way to show how destructive inflation can be is through pictures.
And at this link, there’s a gallery of currencies from nations, and time periods, in which inflation went mad and became hyperinflation.
Some are familiar: The two trillion mark from 1923 Germany. The 100 trillion dollar Zimbabwean note from 2008.
But those are small change compared to the 10 quintillion Hungarian pengo from 1946.
That’s 19 zeros, for those counting at home.
The site also offers some perspective on the economic conditions these bank notes represent:
…researchers unearthed a total of 56 episodes of hyperinflation, many of them previously unreported in English-language works. It needs to be noted that the criterion used in their paper is very strict: a consumer price increase of at least 50% in a month. This excludes countries such as Israel, Vietnam, or Italy, even though they experienced many years of very steep inflation – and in the latter two cases, ended up with banknote denominations all the way up to 500,000.
Hyperinflation and societal turmoil go hand-in-hand; the episodes highlighted in the paper – and showcased above – are often associated with the rise or fall of authoritarian regimes and with civil war; communist and socialist systems account for about one half of the total, but right-wing dictatorships have a strong showing, too. Overall, you can clearly identify several major clusters: the fallout from the collapse of the USSR is by far the largest one, robbing dozens of already-moribund economies of their competition-free Eastern Bloc markets and exposing them to the realities of free trade. The run-up to and the aftermath of WWII forms another cluster – perhaps a more consequential but also a much smaller one. And in the past several decades, the haphazard fiscal policies and the civil struggles in South America and Africa come to dominate the list.
But the most surprising realization? All but one of the documented episodes of hyperinflation occurred in the last 100 years.
None of this means hyperinflation is in our future. But these curiosities remind us that inflation isn’t just a thief in the night. It can be Godzilla smashing everything in its path.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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& face Depression 2??