And that was before the inflation really got bad. By January 1994, the rate would reach 313 million percent and this note became literally worthless. But as both Jude Wanniski and Steve Hanke have shown, it was the IMF that bears primary responsibility for this fiasco. It was the agency's emphasis on regime stability after 1987, and the usual package of devaluations, wage freezes, unlimited credit, and price decontrol in a setting of collectivist ownership, that made a chaotic economic setting even crazier, and set the stage for a wholesale looting of the country by its government. In this case, the bad idea is that what this country needed was a new economic plan thrown together with paper money.
Civilization is subverted by inflation.
Readers old enough to remember 13 percent inflation remember how it turned life upside down. Savers were considered to be suckers while financial profligacy was considered wise' Plans of a lifetime were gutted, employees were always angry, and businessmen found even the simplest accounting tasks to be maddeningly confusing. And yet 13 percent is hardly high by this century's egregious standards. In his 1994 article in The Review of Austrian Economics , Paul Cantor reinterpreted a 1925 short story by Thomas Mann set in Weimar Germany. It tells of an average day for a professor of history that ends with life gone mad.