Jim,

I would like to congratulate you and Peter about your article on hyper inflation.

I lived in Brazil and this is exactly what happened.

A Dragon named Inflation

I lived in Brazil during the 1960s and 70s, so I have an idea of what rampant, uncontrolled inflation can do. At its worst, the currency was losing about 30 to 40% of its value each month. This explains how 1 = 1 came to be 1 = 0.00000000000000001, or whatever. This page is supposed to give the reader an idea of what happens when you live where inflation is out of control. Please understand that in the last eight years, things (I mean the annual inflation rate) have been fairly good by Brazilian standards, even if the real (as Brazil’s currency is now called) is under a lot of pressure from many different areas (exports, government spending, foreign debt, etc…). This page looks back at life and money in Brazil in the last forty years or so.

The president’s monetary policy vs the dragon. Brazil humorists have a lot of fun with inflation, and the public is always skeptical of their ability to control the dragon. For some reason, inflation is often symbolized as a dragon, just as the income tax is a lion. Anyway, in the cartoon, the dragon is not impressed with the new real currency.

A high inflation rate means you do to bed with $100 in the bank (or in your pocket) and wake up with $98 or 99, and on the next day you have $96, without spending a penny (well, acentavo). It also means when you get paid, you immediately go to the market for groceries and/or stores to purchase any basic goods you may need. This page is about Brazil’s battle with the evil dragon viewed though it’s paper money .

For most of the early part of then 20th century, Brazil’s money was called Reis, meaning "kings". By the 1930s the standard denomination was Mil Reis meaning a thousand kings — that is alot of blue blood flowing on the market.

By 1942 the currency that devalued so much that the Vargas government instituted a monetary reform, changing the currency to cruzeiros (crosses) at a value of 1000 to 1. Twenty thousand reaisbank notes were stamped as twenty cruzeiros, as seen in the example here. Over the next fifty years, the poor stamp overlay machines were to stay busy. As you will notice on this page I have tried to find paper notes "stamped" (carimbadas) with the new values. These notes remained in circulation a few months until the new "official" notes with the new denominations became available.

More…

We don’t know when Hyperinflation will come to the US but it will come.

When you will start seeing prices of essential goods rising, this will be it. But people on the street shouldn’t trust the government inflation numbers! We just have to go regularly into the supermarket near us to find out as hyperinflation may well be worldwide.

By reading Peter’s Formula, I noticed that the vicious cycle is maintained by a weak government (see part 9 of the 10 steps) policy such as printing fiat money in unreasonable ways. In Brazil, in the 70’s, we had dumb government solutions such as price readjustment indexes.

In the US, Volcker with its strong monetary policy helped stop this vicious cycle in the 70’s by raising rates to unprecedented levels. Will Obama follow Volcker’s steps at one point of his presidential mandate? I don’t think so or maybe a long way down the road.

Thank you for all!
Best regards,
CIGA Christopher

Dear Christopher:

Thanks are to Peter, a man of rare perception, a true student of economic history and a man to be reckoned with. When introducing his economic committee, President Elect Obama said no less than six times that this group would disagree. The liberal economic policy will be followed with ever expanding Fiscal Stimulation along with both the Fed and Treasury continuing to bail out every major entity that falls.

Respectfully yours,
Jim