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Hyperinflation

Hyperinflation, a definition from Wikipedia: “In economics, hyperinflation is inflation that is “out of control,” a condition in which prices increase rapidly as a currency loses its value. The formal definition is: “inflation exceeding 50% a month.” In informal usage the term is often applied to much lower rates. As a rule of thumb, normal inflation is reported per year, but hyperinflation is often reported for much shorter intervals, often per month.

Although there is a great deal of debate about the root causes of hyperinflation, it becomes visible when there is an unchecked increase in the money supply or drastic debasement of coinage, and is often associated with wars (or their aftermath), economic depressions, and political or social upheavals.”

The graph shows the escalating cost of a loaf of bread in postwar Germany during the period of the Weimar Republic. Starting in 1918 at 0.63 marks per loaf and ending 5 years later at 201,000,000,000 per. Yes that is 201 billion.

The German mark in 1923 was 4,200,000,000 to a single US dollar.

Some extreme historical examples:

-Germany in 1923 when the rate of inflation doubled every 49 hours.
-Greece during its occupation by German troops (1941-1944) prices doubled every 28 hours. 
-The most severe known incident of inflation was in Hungary after the end of World War II when prices doubled every 15 hours.

The journalist, Friedrich Kroner, described the social repercussions of the 1923 inflation in his article “Overwrought Nerves,” first published in the Berliner Illustrite Zeitung on August 26, 1923:

“There is not much to add. It pounds daily on the nerves: the insanity of numbers, the uncertain future, today, and tomorrow become doubtful once more overnight. An epidemic of fear, naked need: lines of shoppers, long since an unaccustomed sight, once more form in front of the shops, first in front of one, then in front of all. No disease is as contagious as this one. The lines have something suggestive about them: the women’s glances, theirn hastily donned kitchen dresses, their careworn, patient faces. This line always sends the same message: the city, the big stone city will be shopped empty again. Rice, 80,000 marks a pound yesterday, costs 160,000 marks today, and tomorrow perhaps twice as much; the day after, the man behind the counter will shrug his shoulders, “No more rice.” Well then noodles! “No more noodles.” Barley, groats, beans, lentils—always the same, buy, buy, buy. The piece of paper, the spanking brandnew bank note, still moist from the printers, paid out today as a weekly wage, shrinks in value on the way to the grocer’s shop. The zeros, multiplying zeros! “Well, zero, zero ain’t nothing.”
They rise with the dollar, hate, desperation, and need—daily emotions like daily rates of exchange. The rising dollar brings mockery and laughter: “Cheaper butter! Instead of 1,600,000 marks just 1,400,000 marks.” This is no joke; this is reality written seriously with a pencil, hung in the shop window; and seriously read.
It rises with the dollar, the haste to turn that piece of paper into something one can swallow, something filling. The weekend markets overflow with people. . . .
Somewhere patience ex;lodes. Resignation breaks. Not at the turnip man, who is a big fellow. One also swallows the butcher’s biting remark, that all cows have to have bones. One pays and staggers off. Then the girl in the dairy store, the one whose face is always pinched, whose way of speaking becomes every more finicky. . .she issues regulations: how one is to behave as a customer, that shoving is rude, that everyone should not shout at once. Otherwise she can not concentrate on the scale. “Come on, when am I finally going to get my butter?” screams a woman. “Your butter. It is not your butter by a long shot. By the time hyou get to the front of the line, your butter will be all gone.” And then comes the umbrella handle, a response crashing through the glass cover on the cream cheese. And the cop standing watch outside pulls a sobbing woman from the store. And there is an uproar. And charges are filed.”