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[jaydub]

Move to Zimbabwe.  Exchange rate: (approx, as of this week) $10 Billion Zimbabwe dollars to $1 US.

I have a pretty good grasp of mathematics, but I can't conceive of what it means to have an inflation rate of 4 million percent.  I've got to think that real economic activity has reverted to a barter system there.  There's no way I'd accept paper for goods today that would be unimaginably less valuable tomorrow.

[Arachno-capitalist]

I love hyperinflation! I made a movie about hyperinflation! If I could work the youtube, Id post it.
In Germany whole life savings evaporated in hours and prices changed so rapidly people were paid two or three times a day.
A woman left a wheelbarrow of money outside a store while she went in to get a loaf of bread, when she came back, someone had dumped out the money and stole the wheelbarrow! And forget billionaire, they were printing 10 trillion mark notes, which were just old notes with more zeros stamped on them.
42,000,000,000,000,000% monthly inflation!

[theinevitable]

man, it seems insane that that could happen back in the Day, when it was a heck of a lot harder to communicate things quickly. I mean, didn't the news only happen once a day back then?

[Arachno-capitalist]

Thats part of the beauty of Prices. Prices communicate a lot of information very quickly across systems.

[theinevitable]

it just seems incredible that people could be instantly aware of the need to raise prices across an entire country.

"my spidey-sense is tingling, there was probably a ton more inflation just now. Better quintuple the price of carrots."
Although, this is pretty plausible, as all capitalists have a spidey-sense for profit, right?

[Arachno-capitalist]

Its actually a small gland next to my heart that vibrates when profitable situations can be abused. I communicate with other capitalists via frequency resonance (like the andromeda strain) of the gland, whereby we can access the hive mind and converge until equilibrium is attained.

[littlefallsmets]

It's butterfly effect.

One bastard decides he can get away with raising prices a little for some "reasonable" reason, more bastards see that and follow suit and all of the sudden you got yourself a bastard cascade and... pretty soon, five dollars a gallon for gas.

By that point, even non-bastards have to raise their prices to cope with the rising prices of everything else, freeing up the bastards to jack up prices all the fuck over the place and be able to blame other people's price hikes on it.

It's bastard butterfly effect.

[Arachno-capitalist]

Do you really think thats how hyperinflation works or are you just trying to be cute? Hyperinflation is pushed from policy makers, not pulled from markets. This is a factual statement. Not an argument. A market can't raise prices this fast or that high without currency being pushed into the system. If demand for currency outpaced supply, then the currency in the market would have hire buying power, not less, which is what inflation is.

Currency is controlled by a government. When a government needs to pay debts and it cant loan any more, it prints more money. The printed money coming from the government is High Powered Money, because no one knows yet that it is worth less and the government can push currency into the market and pay its debts. However, as the market becomes flooded with more and more currency people get hip to it and prices of everything from labor to carrots skyrockets. As people expect the momentum of inflation to continue from day to day, a spiral develops until you can't buy fuel to heat your home so you start burning blocks of worthless currency. The natural reaction would be to trade to a different more stable currency, but that presupposes there is some one out there willing to buy your garbage currency. Therefore, in last ditch efforts, the government pulls tricks like reprinting currency in exponential notation.
When all of this reaches its inevitable conclusion, the most common solution is to recall all of the old currency and exchange it for a newer stable currency.

[littlefallsmets]

Oh, I suppose I was exaggerating to be cute but... mostly serious.

Look, that all sounds great in a book and... I'm sure it's a factor in the mix... but I'm not sure how you connect the dots between monetary policy and the current recession teetering on the verge of a much worse kinda -ession.

Looking outside the window and in the newspaper page instead of in textbooks written by laisse-faire corporatists for the purposes of educating laisse-faire corporatists, it seems like a lot less a monetary policy thing and...

A lot more a combination of a ridiculously deregulated energy industry using a foreign war and shady investment practices as an excuse to gouge the hell out of petroleum, throwing the entire economy out of wack because you can't ship goods without petroleum...

Along with a deregulated banking industry allowed to predatory-lend this country out of a middle class, a corporatist government that allows American companies to ship everything of the economy but the shareholder profits overseas and a broken health care system eating up whatever was left of the middle class after the predatory lenders were done gorging.

While I'm sure that there is some effect in terms of monetary policy, to exacerbate or ameliorate problems to limited extents... I really really really don't see how it could be at the base of the current problems.

If you can explain how that would work, I am genuinely interested.

But petroleum is the bottleneck point of our entire economy and it seems a lot more logical that an energy industry allowed to price gouge and speculate their own oil and gas through the goddamned roof was the start point of all this craziness, not how much bread's being printed or how much banks are allowed to charge as their base interest or whatever.

[Arachno-capitalist]

Where did this oil argument come form? The thread was talking about hyperinflation in Zimbabwe. Gas prices are the least of Zimbabwe's problems.

[littlefallsmets]

Ah, that's where the confusion was.

I thought the discussion expanded to American's current clusterfuck too. My bad.

[smick]

it just seems incredible that people could be instantly aware of the need to raise prices across an entire country.

I imagine that some dude that didn't hear the news felt awesome when some lady wanted to buy a loaf of bread with a $1,000,000,000 DM note.

Then he felt like a chump when all his wheelbarrows went missing.

[dejavroom]

Its actually a small gland next to my heart that vibrates when profitable situations can be abused. I communicate with other capitalists via frequency resonance (like the andromeda strain) of the gland, whereby we can access the hive mind and converge until equilibrium is attained.

Can'd for the creep.

[Victoria Waterfield]

I imagine that some dude that didn't hear the news felt awesome when some lady wanted to buy a loaf of bread with a $1,000,000,000 DM note.

Then he felt like a chump when all his wheelbarrows went missing.

It must have been hard to tell the Krazy furniture store owners from the sane ones.