Should we call this reverse monetarism?
The “answer” on the July 1 episode of Jeopardy was as follows:
In the 1940s, the country’s Magyar Nemzeti Bank printed billions of pengo notes to fight inflation.
Contestants were expected to say, and one said, “What is Hungary?”
The problem, of course, is that you don’t fight inflation by adding more value to money; that creates more inflation. The people coming up with the clues are obviously smart and I don’t expect them to know much about economics, but how can anyone think that printing more money “fights” inflation rather than adding to it? I don’t understand their mental model.
One of my favorite articles about hyperinflation is, not surprisingly, the one I posted A short encyclopedia of Economics.
By Michael K. Salemi, “Hyperinflation.” Notice that in the third paragraph, he discusses the Hungarian inflation that Jeopardy was referring to. It was more extreme than the German hyperinflation of 1921 to 1923.
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