About
    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Search
Full

hyperinflation

25 May 2025 - 25 May 2025
Open in Logseq
    • image.png
    • Money is a fiction, its value is taken on faith, until it isn't.
    • My mother lived through hyperinflation as a young girl in Weimar Germany and had stories about paying a few million marks for basic goods.
    • It's such an oddly concrete example of a systemic failure mode. Obviously its in nobody's interest, should be controlled on a systemic level, but everybody's local incentives cause it to happen.
    • I have. book on it somewhere. Oh yeah When Money Dies, Adam Fergussson
      • If what happened to the defeated Central Powers in the ealry 1920s is anything to go by, then the process of collapse of the recognised, traditional, trusted medium of exchange, the currency by which all values are measured, by which social status is guaranteed, upon which security depends, and in which the fruits of labour are sotred, unleashed such greed, vilence, unhappiness, and hatred, largely bred from fear, as no society can survive uncrippled and unchanged. p2