For those who want to understand the human suffering and day-to-day travails produced by hyperinflation, the following book is the best source that I know of:
The Nightmare of Deficit Spending, Devaluation, and Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany
This history of inflation in Weimar German is probably the most readable and riveting ever published. This is the reason this book, published first in 1975, is so legendary. The first generation that read it went wild and bought as many copies as were available. Then it went out of print.
For years, copies fetched thousands of dollars on the used book market. There’s nothing like that kind of price tag to draw interest. Somehow a publisher has finally managed to sort out a complex rights issue to bring it back into print.
The Mises Institute is interested because the author has a thoroughly Austrian take on the money issue here. And as a narrative of the wild events of the period, nothing else compares.
This was a time of bizarre parallels: amazing riches coinciding with terrible poverty, mass quantities of money coinciding with a shortage of money, hysteria coinciding with mass depression, frenzied freedom coinciding with the rise of dictatorship. There is no better historical account of what inflation does to society: it turns everything upside down. And the circumstances surrounding how it all occurred are eerily similar to our own today.
In short, you will find this book terrifying, gripping, educational, and extremely powerful.
