Inflation surges in April as consumer prices leap 4.2%, fastest since 2008

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This is a CNBC article you moron

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this virus is 100% on Biden and his administration-

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Trump would have had us roaring again.

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Go read a book and stop being so stupid.

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By October 1918, the last full month of World War I, the quantity of paper marks had been increased fourfold over what it was in the pre­war year 1913, yet prices in Ger­many had increased only 139 percent. Even by October 1919, when the paper money circulation had increased sevenfold over that of 1913, prices had not quite increased sixfold. But by January 1920 this relationship was reversed: money in circulation had increased 8.4 times and the wholesale price index 12.6 times. By November 1921 circula­tion had increased 18 times and wholesale prices 34 times. By November 1922 circulation had in­creased 127 times and wholesale prices 1,154 times, and by Novem­ber 1923 circulation had increased 245 billion times and prices 1,380 billion times.

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In what we may call Stage One, prices do not increase nearly as much as the increase in the paper money circulation. This is because the man in the street is hardly aware that the money supply is being increased. He still has confidence in the money and in the pre-existing price level.

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Then the inflation moves into what we may call Stage Two, when people become aware that the money stock has increased, and is still increasing. Prices then go up approximately as much as the quan­tity of money is increased. This is the result assumed by the rigid quantity theory of money. But Stage Two, in fact, may last only for a short time. People begin to assume that the government is going to keep increasing the issuance of paper money indefinite­ly, and even at an accelerating rate. They lose all trust in it. The result is Stage Three, when prices begin to increase far faster than the govern­ment increases, or even than it can increase, the stock of money.

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Its origin is hardly obscure. To pay for the tremendous expen­ditures called for by a total war, the German government, like others, found it both economically and politically far easier to print money than to raise adequate taxes. In the period from 1914 to October 1923, taxes covered only about 15 per cent of expenditures. In the last ten days of October 1923, ordinary taxes were covering less than 1 percent of expenses.

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In the last months of the German inflation, beginning in the summer of 1923, internal prices spurted forward and reached the level of world prices, even allowing for the incredibly depreciated exchange. The exchange rate of the paper mark, calculated in gold marks, was 1,523,809 on August 28, 1923. It was 28,809,524 on September 25, 15,476,190,475 on October 30, and was "stablized" finally at 1,000,­000,000,000 gold marks on Novem­ber 20.

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One change that brought about these astronomical figures is that merchants had finally decided to price their goods in gold. They fixed their prices in paper marks ac­cording to the exchange rate. Wages and salaries also began to be "indexed," based on the official cost­-of-living figures. Methods were even devised for basing wages not only on the existing depreciation but on the probable future depreciation of the mark.

Finally, with the mark depreciat­ing every hour, more and more Germans began to deal with each other in foreign currencies, prin­cipally in dollars.

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But this loss had one notable offset. In the earlier stages of the inflation, foreigners could not resist the idea that the depreciated Ger­man mark was a tremendous bargain. They bought huge quan­tities. One German economist calculated that they probably lost seven-eights of their money, or about 5 billion gold marks, "a sum triple that paid by Germany in foreign exchange on account of reparations."

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The nominal profits of the com­panies were frequently high, but there seemed no point in holding them for distribution because they would lose so much of their purchas­ing power in the period between the time they were earned and the day the stockholder got them. They were therefore ploughed back into the business. But people desperately wanted a return, and they could make short term loans at huge nominal rates of interest.

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as the U.S. economic recovery kicked into gear

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