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From the end of the article: But the most surprising realization? All but one of the documented episodes of hyperinflation occurred in the last 100 years. I

From the end of the article: But the most surprising realization? All but one of the documented episodes of hyperinflation occurred in the last 100 years. I feel that with all the QE going on right now, we might soon add major currencies to this list.

mtoner23 4y ago
What QE? we are in an era of quantative tightening right now actually.
- octoberfranklin 4y ago
  Before departing, Mr. Horse left a note saying to close the barn door.
bee_rider 4y ago
I'm curious how surprising this really is. I mean I imagine most of the documented anythings have happened in the last 100 years, because documentation of everything has gotten so much better over the last 100 years. Not to mention, how do you have hyperinflation with gold bars and barter?
- chrisco255 4y ago
  We have pretty good documentation on the performance of currencies over the past 500-2000 years. It is usually of historical note when an entire nation's economy collapses as a result of hyperinflation.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > We have pretty good documentation on the performance of currencies over the past 500-2000 years. Not “Pretty good” enough to detect hyperinflation by the definition at issue (50%+ monthly inflation.) Before regular, systematic, and frequent collection of data for price indexes, we have good enough data to make wide-range estimates of inflation over intervals of years to decades, in the best cases, but hyperinflation (whether or not it produces collapse of currency) doesn't continue long enough to show up in that, and also hyperinflation tends to correlate with conditions which reduce the availability and survivability of data. (The author of the article here notes a data problem with Yugoslavia in the late 20th century, for instance.)
  - lucb1e 4y ago
    > [...] over the past 500-2000 years. It is usually of historical note when an entire nation's economy collapses as a result of hyperinflation. From the OP: "[In 2012,] the researchers unearthed a total of 56 episodes of hyperinflation, many of them previously unreported in English-language works." If we don't even report on the ones in recent high-literacy times, I can't imagine what the odds of this going untranslated/unnoticed are more than two hundred years ago.
    - chrisco255 4y ago
      "...previously unreported..." "...many of them..." There is at least a bit of spin in those words that aren't quantified by your impression of them. What is meant by 'many' in this regard? 12 of them (out of 56) were unreported? Unreported in English-language works, really? Qualify that statement, show me where you or the authors actually combed through all the works of the English language to arrive at such a statement. Show me one example among the 56 for which I cannot find a prior report on in English language works. Some things are written in such a way as to provide editorial impact. But they're not an accurate representation of the historical record by any means.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    In addition to what others have said, we have no shortage of economic collapses throughout history as a result of nations and banks becoming unable to pay their debts and/or basic necessities becoming unaffordable to citizens, we just record them as defaults and bank runs, complete collapses of the entire nations and mass famines (and wars and pogroms to try to make up gold shortfalls) rather than neat little time series of goods prices (which nobody collected in earnest until the late nineteenth century)
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I'm curious how surprising this really is. Not really. Hyperinflation is a failure mode expected to be almost unique to fiat currency, which is relevantly recent as a norm. Other types of currencies have different problems. Plus, having data that would even detect hyperinflation is a recent thing in most of the world. Actually, what jumps out from thaf data (especially when you look into when the inflationary spiral that spiked into hyperinflation happened in individual cases) is that hyperinflation seems overwhelmingly to have one specific cause: major, especially global, conflict, and especially losing such a conflict; the main clusters are associated with (and shortly follow) the end of WWI, the end of WWII, and the end of the Cold War (the collapse of the Russian Ruble around 1992 is by itself about 1/5 of the list, becauae each country that was using it is listed as a separate incident.)
  - _0ffh 4y ago
    It's actually fiat money that makes it possible to escalate conflicts to such a disastrous level in the first place. If you're on a gold standard and your war chest starts to run out, you must either find a wealthy lender (hard), press the plunder of your citizenry (limited & bad for morale) or start thinking about a peace deal. With fiat you can just fire up the printing presses, the later consequences be damned (should you even be aware of them). The first one to have their economy collapse loses, but in the meantime the slaughter can go on.
    - rory 4y ago
      This train of thought is logical, but what is the practical application for a given nation? Even if one were to abandon fiat money, there's no way to force their adversaries to do so as well. The game theory seemingly pushes everyone to run the printing presses, so to speak, now that the fiat toothpaste is out of the tube.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > It's actually fiat money that makes it possible to escalate conflicts to such a disastrous level in the first place. Yes, one of the failure modes of commodity/representational currencies is that in emergencies—natural.or artificial, war or peace—your state and economy collapse before they would run the risk of hyperinflation with fiat money. That's one of the reasons those systems have been abandoned generally. (Oddly, goldbugs see this as a selling point of commodity currency.)
- mr_toad 4y ago
  To have hyperinflation with gold you’d either have to have a massive influx of gold (orders of magnitude), or debase the currency by the same amount. It’s hard to debase metal currency that quickly, because of all the currency in circulation, and because past a certain point it stops being recognisable as gold.
- fzzt 4y ago
  The history of coinage spans thousands of years. Despite the popular tales, spot barter was almost certainly not the basis of any real economies. There is definitely some bias in the availability of data, but it was comparatively harder to end up in a hyperinflationary spiral in the era of commodity or representative currencies, and these were commonplace until the twentieth century. There were instances of money suddenly losing all value due to the failure of the issuing state (e.g., confederate dollar banknotes), but that's probably a different story.
- thedorkknight 4y ago
  Not to mention that you have the most number of people in history in the last hundred years, so you'd expect "largest amount of" stats to generally be from that time period (as long as they're stuff related to humans)
- Ekaros 4y ago
  You can debase coins. Lower the precious part and replace it with less precious. Also, I think more key factor is the ease of printing/minting new bigger values and the amount of economic trade that happened. If you didn't buy or trade too much back in time stepping back to barter temporarily was rather easy. Mass manufacturing is rather late thing. And during industrial revolution hyperinflation is unlikely to happen.
tootie 4y ago
I'm not an economics or historian but I think hyperinflation can only really happen paper currency which is relatively modern of an invention. But that doesn't mean we invented a new problem out of hubris. Hyperinflation is only a problem in that it can cause necessary goods to become unaffordable. Goods being unaffordable (or straight up unavailable) almost certainly happened more frequently prior to paper currency.

mtoner23 4y ago

What QE? we are in an era of quantative tightening right now actually.

octoberfranklin 4y ago
Before departing, Mr. Horse left a note saying to close the barn door.

bee_rider 4y ago

I'm curious how surprising this really is. I mean I imagine most of the documented anythings have happened in the last 100 years, because documentation of everything has gotten so much better over the last 100 years. Not to mention, how do you have hyperinflation with gold bars and barter?

chrisco255 4y ago
We have pretty good documentation on the performance of currencies over the past 500-2000 years. It is usually of historical note when an entire nation's economy collapses as a result of hyperinflation.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > We have pretty good documentation on the performance of currencies over the past 500-2000 years. Not “Pretty good” enough to detect hyperinflation by the definition at issue (50%+ monthly inflation.) Before regular, systematic, and frequent collection of data for price indexes, we have good enough data to make wide-range estimates of inflation over intervals of years to decades, in the best cases, but hyperinflation (whether or not it produces collapse of currency) doesn't continue long enough to show up in that, and also hyperinflation tends to correlate with conditions which reduce the availability and survivability of data. (The author of the article here notes a data problem with Yugoslavia in the late 20th century, for instance.)
- lucb1e 4y ago
  > [...] over the past 500-2000 years. It is usually of historical note when an entire nation's economy collapses as a result of hyperinflation. From the OP: "[In 2012,] the researchers unearthed a total of 56 episodes of hyperinflation, many of them previously unreported in English-language works." If we don't even report on the ones in recent high-literacy times, I can't imagine what the odds of this going untranslated/unnoticed are more than two hundred years ago.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    "...previously unreported..." "...many of them..." There is at least a bit of spin in those words that aren't quantified by your impression of them. What is meant by 'many' in this regard? 12 of them (out of 56) were unreported? Unreported in English-language works, really? Qualify that statement, show me where you or the authors actually combed through all the works of the English language to arrive at such a statement. Show me one example among the 56 for which I cannot find a prior report on in English language works. Some things are written in such a way as to provide editorial impact. But they're not an accurate representation of the historical record by any means.
- notahacker 4y ago
  In addition to what others have said, we have no shortage of economic collapses throughout history as a result of nations and banks becoming unable to pay their debts and/or basic necessities becoming unaffordable to citizens, we just record them as defaults and bank runs, complete collapses of the entire nations and mass famines (and wars and pogroms to try to make up gold shortfalls) rather than neat little time series of goods prices (which nobody collected in earnest until the late nineteenth century)
dragonwriter 4y ago
> I'm curious how surprising this really is. Not really. Hyperinflation is a failure mode expected to be almost unique to fiat currency, which is relevantly recent as a norm. Other types of currencies have different problems. Plus, having data that would even detect hyperinflation is a recent thing in most of the world. Actually, what jumps out from thaf data (especially when you look into when the inflationary spiral that spiked into hyperinflation happened in individual cases) is that hyperinflation seems overwhelmingly to have one specific cause: major, especially global, conflict, and especially losing such a conflict; the main clusters are associated with (and shortly follow) the end of WWI, the end of WWII, and the end of the Cold War (the collapse of the Russian Ruble around 1992 is by itself about 1/5 of the list, becauae each country that was using it is listed as a separate incident.)
- _0ffh 4y ago
  It's actually fiat money that makes it possible to escalate conflicts to such a disastrous level in the first place. If you're on a gold standard and your war chest starts to run out, you must either find a wealthy lender (hard), press the plunder of your citizenry (limited & bad for morale) or start thinking about a peace deal. With fiat you can just fire up the printing presses, the later consequences be damned (should you even be aware of them). The first one to have their economy collapse loses, but in the meantime the slaughter can go on.
  - rory 4y ago
    This train of thought is logical, but what is the practical application for a given nation? Even if one were to abandon fiat money, there's no way to force their adversaries to do so as well. The game theory seemingly pushes everyone to run the printing presses, so to speak, now that the fiat toothpaste is out of the tube.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > It's actually fiat money that makes it possible to escalate conflicts to such a disastrous level in the first place. Yes, one of the failure modes of commodity/representational currencies is that in emergencies—natural.or artificial, war or peace—your state and economy collapse before they would run the risk of hyperinflation with fiat money. That's one of the reasons those systems have been abandoned generally. (Oddly, goldbugs see this as a selling point of commodity currency.)
mr_toad 4y ago
To have hyperinflation with gold you’d either have to have a massive influx of gold (orders of magnitude), or debase the currency by the same amount. It’s hard to debase metal currency that quickly, because of all the currency in circulation, and because past a certain point it stops being recognisable as gold.
fzzt 4y ago
The history of coinage spans thousands of years. Despite the popular tales, spot barter was almost certainly not the basis of any real economies. There is definitely some bias in the availability of data, but it was comparatively harder to end up in a hyperinflationary spiral in the era of commodity or representative currencies, and these were commonplace until the twentieth century. There were instances of money suddenly losing all value due to the failure of the issuing state (e.g., confederate dollar banknotes), but that's probably a different story.
thedorkknight 4y ago
Not to mention that you have the most number of people in history in the last hundred years, so you'd expect "largest amount of" stats to generally be from that time period (as long as they're stuff related to humans)
Ekaros 4y ago
You can debase coins. Lower the precious part and replace it with less precious. Also, I think more key factor is the ease of printing/minting new bigger values and the amount of economic trade that happened. If you didn't buy or trade too much back in time stepping back to barter temporarily was rather easy. Mass manufacturing is rather late thing. And during industrial revolution hyperinflation is unlikely to happen.

tootie 4y ago

I'm not an economics or historian but I think hyperinflation can only really happen paper currency which is relatively modern of an invention. But that doesn't mean we invented a new problem out of hubris. Hyperinflation is only a problem in that it can cause necessary goods to become unaffordable. Goods being unaffordable (or straight up unavailable) almost certainly happened more frequently prior to paper currency.