Hyperinflation! (Primer)

Hyperinflation is a phenomenon that has caused a significant amount of hyperventilation within economic and market commentary. The pictures of people using wheelbarrows of money to go shopping are certainly memorable.

NOTE: This is an unedited draft of a section that will make its way into my inflation primer. I have kept this section minimal, but may add more later during editing.

(Not) Understanding Government Finance...

Although the article "Trump's Ideas About the Deficit Sound Inflationary" (by Finance Professor Noah Smith) was supposed to tell readers how crazy Donald Trump's theories about debt were, it actually highlighted that mainstream views about inflation are actually the ones that are fairly ludicrous. I would note that I cover most of the underlying debate behind this article in Understanding Government Finance. 

A MMT View On The Theory Of Hyperinflations

The post "CMMT - Cate's Modern Monetary Theory" (on Seeking Alpha; free registration required) by Vincent Cate attracted a fair number of comments on the Mike Norman Economics web site. In that post, he presents what he calls CMMT - Corrected Modern Monetary Theory - and he argues that this correction allows MMT to explain hyperinflation. One could probably argue that MMT - as well as mainstream economic theory - do not have standard models that deal with hyperinflation. But that is for the same reason that those bodies of thought do not have standard models to estimate the impact of barbarian incursions along the frontier. It is not to say that foreign incursions do not matter - as the Western Roman Empire can attest - but that such an event is not a serious concern for the industrial economies at present.