Bloomberg Businessweek - USA (2021-03-08

12

TSVANGIRAYI

MUKWAZHI/AP

PHOTO

◼ REMARKS

● Talk that the U.S. is going the way

of Zimbabwe or Venezuela is bunk—

but bunk can move markets and

influence policy

● By Peter Coy

forces—perhaps the Democratic Party—to destroy the nation

and deliver ... something. “Hyperinflation this summer will

usher in the next wave of leftist authoritarianism. There

will be asset seizures and capital outflow controls soon,”

paul_revere2021_4 wrote recently on Reddit’s NoNewNormal

forum. Images of Fed Chair Jerome Powell maniacally print-

ing dollar bills are all over the internet. There’s even a website

called moneyprintergobrrr.com, though you shouldn’t visit it

if you’re troubled by recordings of people screaming in agony.

This wouldn’t matter except that conspiracy theories

have an insidious way of seeping into the real world. Fear

of inflation—if not outright hyperinflation—helps explain the

meteoric rise of Bitcoin. It’s behind distrust of the Fed. And it

feeds congressional opposition to President Biden’s $1.9 tril-

lion pandemic relief plan.

Hyperinflated hyperinflationism isn’t emanating only from

basement bloggers and Redditors. Paul Singer, the billionaire

head of hedge fund Elliott Management Corp., wrote to inves-

tors last year that “hyperinflation, a rejection of fake money

and fake-knowledgeable central bankers, is possibly lurking

just out of sight.” Dick Morris, a onetime adviser to President

Bill Clinton who later veered to the right, told the conservative

We know from the past year that quite a few people inhabit

alternate realities that float above the factual landscape like

giant, impervious, untethered balloons. One unmoored bal-

loon that’s reached enormous proportions recently is the

specter of hyperinflation—the conviction that a reckless

expansion in the money supply will trigger an endless cycle

of currency depreciation and price hikes, turning the U.S.

into the equivalent of Weimar Germany circa 1923, Zimbabwe

circa 2020, or present-day Venezuela.

This is meme economics, so the underlying theory

can be hard to pin down, but the general idea seems

to be that the Federal Reserve is in league with dark

The Hyperinflation Hype