Comment by roxolotl
11 hours ago
In 2023 my father was talking about how his grandfather talked about the inflation and the Weimar Republic. He talked about it how clearly in 2023 inflation was going to destroy the US as well.
My father is in his late 60s. He lived through the 70s. He saw double digit inflation. He saw price controls. All in his prime working years.
I don’t know where this leaves us. But it worries me when even those with memories to draw from don’t.
To be clear I'm not trying to say it will or won't happen, just that when people think hyperinflation, they think of a purely monetary phenomenon where inflation exceeds some threshold so it gets a "hyper-" prefix. I think it's worth thinking about the phenomenon more deeply when trying to pattern match because there's more to it. It's also something that's not super well understood since we don't have a ton of data points on it.
Would sure be nice to live in precedented times for a change.
Oh yes I agree. Not trying to downplay the recent inflation at all. More musing about how it’s interesting that we’re mostly looking back to events outside of the US when in reality we can look to the US for much of this. Which isn’t to say don’t look everywhere more that it feels like we have a blind spot that we shouldn’t have.