Around the cluttered White House offices last week, a new term was being uttered in often hushed terms: hyperinflation. Price rises can no longer be easily labeled creeping or even galloping. Said one nervous Carter aide: "People in meetings are really talking about hyperinflation."
By any historic standard, such talk is still very premature. The alltime inflation record holder is 1946 Hungary, which issued 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 pengo bills worth about $10. Before World War II, a pengo had been worth 200. Germany between World Wars I and II suffered 4 trillion percent inflation, and...
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