A insustentável leveza dos preços

Hyperinflation is inflation that has burst the bounds of politeness. If not halted, hyperinflation will result in a total rejection of the offending currency as money. Under chronic but contained inflation, money depreciates at a slower and more stable rate, while under hyperinflation the decline is highly variable and unpredictable. Exact measurement of the rate of inflation rates is difficult because the computation of price indexes assumes that something fairly stable is being measured. But annual rates of thousands to millions of percent have been recorded in historic episodes.

Serbia's experience reached quantitative extremes unknown elsewhere. In Serbia 1992 the national bank issued single bank notes of 500 billion Serbian dinars. One economic journalist recalls:

the citizens of Yugoslavia were in a constant race against time -- buying whatever they could, wherever there was anything to be bought. Prices increased at a rate of 2 per cent per hour or 64 per cent per day. In 1993, hyperinflation reached a record 400,000 billion per cent. In October of that year, 600 grams of pork cost 26 dinars, with the same amount costing 21 billion dinars three months later.

Em Weimar and Wall Street