> It was reducing / stagnating inflation I think the point was that Brazil attempted multiple times to stop inflation. The problem in a cycle of hyperinflation

> It was reducing / stagnating inflation I think the point was that Brazil attempted multiple times to stop inflation. The problem in a cycle of hyperinflation is that it runs away from you--any measure you enact to stabilize prices is immediately out-of-date. Depending on your approach, that leaves various segments of the economy, e.g. consumers, screwed. If you have 100% inflation per month, if you freeze wages (e.g. through state-owned enterprise) one week but market prices continue increasing for another month because of momentum, you can only buy half as much. This creates enormous political pressures and animosities as you allude, which usually results in the government returning to money printing. Ultimately, a government can't dictate prices even temporarily across an entire market, at least not instantaneously amidst hyperinflation. The point of the fake money was to prime market expectations, presumably especially in the supply chain. Because attempts to manage and slow the built-in expectation of inflation of the existing currency repeatedly failed, instead they created an alternative denomination against which people didn't have set expectations, notwithstanding shifting conversion rates. And it apparently worked. This seems notable because the usual fix for hyperinflation is to just adopt a foreign currency. The fact it worked highlights how the problem at hand was fundamentally a matter of managing market sentiment, not some intrinsic quality of a currency or its issuer.