[azernik]

The drop in productive capacity is the motive, but not the means; the printing of the money is an action to prop up state finances with the direct effect of causing hyperinflation.

i.e. the Zimbabwe narrative should be: the government tried to dig itself out of a hole by printing money.

Similarly, the German government printed money in the 1920s to try to keep up with reparations payments which were larger than the economy could bear through taxation. (Though of course printing money is effectively a tax on savings, with the added effects of disruption to contracts.) And since the reparations were denominated in hard currency there were diminishing returns, as the government was printing ever-devaluing Papiermarks with which to buy Pounds Sterling and Francs.

[RobertoG]

>>"The drop in productive capacity is the motive, but not the means;"

Ok, I though we were talking about the final cause of inflation, not the mechanism, maybe you had something else in mind.

Now, if half of the productive economy disappear overnight, inflation is going to happen whatever the government do. You make it look like a government have an option in that situation.

If tomorrow morning half the fields and factories in the USA have magically disappear you will have inflation. In those circumstances, what sense would make to say that the "government is guilty because they printed too much money"?

Maybe you can tell me some example where something so catastrophic to the real productive economy happened like in Germany in the 20's or Zimbabwe and where inflation didn't happened.

[Retric]

Wars have destroyed huge swaths of a country’s infrastructure without creating hyper inflation.

Also of note hyperinflation does not occur with when the physical currency has high intrinsic value. Such as with the gold or silver standard meaning that any physical cause is insufficient on it’s own. Though a currency can and generally will be moved off of these standards in though economic situations.

So really the minimum requirements are fiat currency or a close equivalent allowing for significant money creation. Everything else is at best a trigger, but is not always repeated in every instance.

[danans]

> Wars have destroyed huge swaths of a country’s infrastructure without creating hyper inflation.

It a morbid thought, but perhaps this is because such a war may lower demand a significant amount by killing or impoverishing sufficient numbers of people.

[azernik]

You have to distinguish between inflation (which every country has, on varying levels) and hyperinflation. Zimbabwe's inflation hit 89.7E63% per year. No, that is not a typo, it is actual powers of 10. In contrast, in Syria inflation is on the order of 20%/year, driven by real-world difficulties in importing and producing goods rather than a drastic expansion of the money supply. That is, when inflation is directly caused by disruptions to the economy, it's on the same order of magnitude as those disruptions.

In the German case, there was no massive damage to the economy; the war had been fought on the territories of France and Russia, and the only major disruption was a brief occupation of and general strike in the Rhineland, affecting maybe 10-20% of the German economy.

A last note: recessions are generally accompanied by deflation, though there the cause-and-effect relationship is complicated.

[RobertoG]

>>"You have to distinguish between inflation (which every country has, on varying levels) and hyperinflation. "

We agree. Inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods. That can happen because the money grows or the goods shrink. My point is that the historical episodes of hyperinflation are originated by the later.

>>"In the German case, there was no massive damage to the economy [..]"

From https://alphahistory.com/weimarrepublic/reparations/ :

"Berlin had failed to pay a £1 billion interim instalment, leading to the occupation of three industrial cities along the Rhine."

"In April the London meeting of the Commission fixed a final reparations figure of £6.6 billion. The reparations instalments were to be paid quarterly in gold or foreign exchange backed by gold, along with tradable commodities such as steel, raw iron or coal. Berlin was informed that any defaults on these payments would lead to the occupation of the industrial Ruhr region and the confiscation of raw materials and industrial equipment there. Though this revised amount was less than two-thirds the figure first proposed, it remained well beyond the capacity of the war-ravaged German economy"

I don't think hyperinflation could be avoided after that.

[azernik]

"War-ravaged" is a weird way for that site to describe an economy with its physical infrastructure entirely intact. The only main "drop" in productive capacity was the reparations payments and confiscations, which while harsh, didn't reduce the size of the German economy by a factor of a trillion (the total depreciation of the Mark from 1918 to 1924).

Inflation could have definitely been avoided by harsh taxation of the general population... but again, the government tried to dig itself out of the budgetary hole by printing money instead. (A budgetary hole exacerbated by the government promising to pay the salaries of workers on strike in the Rhineland.)

[jsjohnst]

> Zimbabwe's inflation hit 89.7E63% per year. No, that is not a typo, it is actual powers of 10.

Yep, I keep Zimbabwe currency from around then as a reminder. I have a paper note for 1/2 a Zimbabwe dollar (aka 50 cents) and a few others printed less than two years later with amounts up to 100 TRILLION dollars.