[zhte415]

The 'oldest' Wikipedia article you linked isn't the 'oldest'. Should you want to go by Wikipedia for a 'truthyness' https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inflation&oldid=2...

But.. we could reference "a rise in the general price level caused by an imbalance between the quantity of money and trade needs" [1] (Cleveland Fed; On the Origin and Evolution of the Word Inflation).

[1] https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...

On reverting to to 'old' meanings, Adam Smith's The real price of everything...is the toil and trouble of acquiring it isn't inconsistent with Marx as long as toil and trouble is, in the end, people. Or perhaps myths of old beliefs that there was no sectoral, geographical nor temporal stickyness to anything. It's as if there were no sudden and unexpected changes in prices during times of a roughly constant amount of specie backing 'prices' that make 10% look like a storm in a teacup, though was it ever 1:1 or was hope to have the means to provide backing more accurate; specie based currency has a long history of volatility over the world, from West African empires to Asia.

We could even go farther... to say that inflation, a change in prices, is caused by expectations of inflation; that the supply of money is driven by the demand for money... and that gets us to whether demand is liability or asset driven which may be full circle.

[janmarsal]

I just want a word for what I think inflation means. Like when zimbabwe printed a huge amount of money and that completely broke their currency. That's what I think when I hear the term inflation, and the metaphor of inflating a currency makes sense. You blow some air or whatever into the mix of metal so that you can mint more coins with the same amount of metal. As a consequence the value of an individual coin goes down because it doesn't have as much metal in it as the old coins. A fiat currency based on trust that gets inflated by the increase of money supply is not as concrete but the effect is the same.

So when I hear "food inflation" I immediately thing of wheat breads. You rise the breads more so you can make more breads with the same amount of wheat, but of course as a consequence the value of an individual bread should go down over time because the wheat content is lower. But instead, when the media talks about "food inflation" it means the price of bread is going up and not down.

I used to think that "inflation" is about reducing the value of something but apparently it means the complete opposite. So I guess I need a new word for that. What would that be? Debasement? Should hyperinflation that is obviously caused by the increase of money supply be renamed as hyperdebasement too? Like what happened in Zimbabwe. Or are hyperinflation and inflation completely unrelated phenomenons now?