I said, "Hyperinflation is
not common at all, much less the inevitable outcome of fiat currency. Hyperinflation most often occurs in countries losing a war." Against this, with great personal indignation, is listed:
A simple check which you have failed to do would have found many countries that have hyperinflated their currencies within our lifetimes, but since your an insular American anything that doesn't happen to you doesn't exist anywhere else:
Angola 1991-1995.
Argentina 1975-1991
Austria 1914 to January 1923
Belarus 1994-2002
Bolivia 1984 and 1986.
Bosnia and Herzegovina 1993
Brazil 1986-1994
Bulgaria 1996
Chile 1973 -1981
Georgia 1994.
Germany 1923-1924
Greece 1944
Hungary 1945 -1946
Israel 1971 - 1984
Japan 1948 – 1951
Madagascar 2005
Mozambique 1992
Peru 1988-1990
Poland 1989
Turkey 1995 - 2005
Ukraine 1993 - 1995
Zaire 1989 - 1996
Zimbabwe 2004-2009
Yes, hyperinflation does occur in countries after a war, but many of these moved off a gold standard to begin relentless printing to pay for these wars...The fiat system centred on the American dollar as the reserve currency is dying, prepare accordingly.
The idea that nations should die lest they debase the currency, i.e., "cheat" debt-holders seems appropriate only to the most debased worshippers of Mammon. The whole thread is based on the idea that fiat currency leads to inflation leads to hyperinflation. The fact that hyperinflation is
not found in nations that are winning the wars really should force itself even upon such mentalities.
Removing from the list the countries that were undergoing a losing war, had lost a major war or had been ripped away from a functional socialist economy (which, really, is equivalent to losing the Cold War,) or internecine domestic violence, aka civil war, the relevant list is:
Bolivia 1984 and 1986.
Brazil 1986-1994
Bulgaria 1996
Chile 1973 -1981
Israel 1971 - 1984
Madagascar 2005
Turkey 1995 - 2005
Yes, Zimbabwe should be removed because its hyperinflation is not endogenous, much less due to its use of fiat money. Zimbabwe has for years been targeted by economic warfare over the plantation seizures conducted by the government. (The racist press always talks about "white farmers" but those were commercial plantations dependent largely upon hired laborers, not family farms.) As seen above, the real list is rather spotty.
Very likely Bolivia should be excluded because of the role of political instability (an European origin ethnic oligarchy has destabilized the country for decades, resulting in alternating periods of military rule.) Israel also is a doubtful case, being pretty much an army at perpetual war rather than a nation as normally understood.
Given the universality of fiat money
without hyperinflation, the lonely examples of Brazil, Bulgaria, Madagascar and Turkey don't constitute even a prima facie case for fiat money leading to hyperinflation. Indeed, it may just be my personal ignorance of the histories of those countries that doesn't remove them from the list as well.
In an inadvertently revealing error, the dates for Chile's bout with hyperinflation are incorrect. Economic warfare against the Allende regime ended in the bloody coup. The dates for 1973-1981 are really the dates for the prolonged decline in living standards due to the hard money policies instituted by the dictator Pinochet's government.
The Argentine bout was terminated with a hard money scheme based on the dollar. That period came to an end when starvation reappeared in the supposedly modern, developed country of Argentina.
Keeping to the gold standard, or some other hard money scheme, is very often equivalent to insisting the the common people pay the price,
even if the price is their lives. That's the whole point to hard money. The proponents of this vicious morality can pretend that soft money hurts people but deflation, which is hard money, hurts people worse.
Up in the thread above, they even tried to pretend soft money drove US farmers off the land, when it was in fact the very opposite. (They could have argued that society as a whole was better off with less people engaged in agriculture, but that's not populist. Lots of this drivel is designed as faux-populism, fake indignation about the hard life of people they plan to exploit.)
The last remark in the quote cited above, about the end of the US dollar as reserve currency, hints at the idea that the US is in effect going to be like post-war Austria, bereft of its empire, and therefore ripe for hyperinflation. That idea, unlike the lunatic assertion that fiat money leads to hyperinflation, may be worth examining. IF it were made. It is no accident that it is merely a parenthetical aside.
There is actually no indication whatsoever that any nation will dare to pull the plug on the US dollar in such a fashion as to induce hyperinflation, however. The US government has determined upon a policy of endless war. The US dollar's reserve role depends upon military violence, not US economic strength. The need to sacrifice everything to the wars is so far unquestioned, but the toll on the US population's living standards is so far unquestioned. And, while people spout witless drivel about fiat money, never will be, which is why the loyal professors of finance will happily earn their salaries by witlessly driveling. The rest of the world will suffer from an empire even more degenerate than the late Roman Empire, which at least brought peace.
