Should we call this reverse monetarism?
One “answer” on the July 1 episode of Jeopardy was:
In the 1940s, the country’s Magyar Nemzeti Bank printed billion-pengo notes to combat inflation.
The candidates were asked, and one of them did: “What is Hungary?”
The problem, of course, is that you don’t fight inflation by dramatically increasing the money supply; that creates more inflation. The people who propose these ideas are obviously smart, and I don’t expect them to know much about economics, but how can anyone think that printing more money “fights” inflation rather than making it worse? I don’t understand their mental model.
One of my favorite articles on hyperinflation, unsurprisingly, is the one I ordered for my Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
This is Michael K. Salemi, “Hyperinflation.” Note that in the third paragraph he mentions the Hungarian inflation that Jeopardy was referring to. It was much more extreme than the German hyperinflation of 1921-1923.
