While there is flexibility in V, there is simply not enough leeway there for hyperinflation -- in hyperinflation you typically get an increase of prices by a fa

While there is flexibility in V, there is simply not enough leeway there for hyperinflation -- in hyperinflation you typically get an increase of prices by a factor of 1000000 or more. There's no way V can increase by that much. Consider salaries, for example. You can pay people daily instead of every two or four weeks, but that only gives you a factor 10 or ~20 (depending on what your baseline is). To get a factor of 1000 in the velocity of money, you'd have to give people their paycheck every 5 minutes or so and they'd have to immediately spend it. Getting to 1000000 is physically impossible. So hyperinflation can only happen when there's something that keeps injecting more money into the system, typically a combination of bank loans and government spending. Of course, the root cause of the hyperinflation isn't either of those things but some underlying economic problem (e.g. war reparations and Ruhr occupation in the case of the Weimar republic hyperinflation, a totally botched land reform in the case of the Zimbabwe hyperinflation). But the point is that if there's nothing that keeps injecting money into the system, the hyperinflation necessarily comes to a screeching halt. Edit: Of course there's a psychological aspect to it as well. Most cases of hyperinflation have a runup of very high inflation, and them some inflection point where things really take off. I've never read a really good study of what precisely causes these inflection points. I imagine it's some kind of policy change that is enabled by those psychological aspects. Whatever it is, the hyperinflation doesn't last long after those inflection points because that's when it becomes really obvious that things can't continue that way and the injection of money must stop.