Myth #7: We'll end up just like Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe.
Reality: Hyperinflation in both countries was caused by circumstances far different than ours.
Reality: Hyperinflation in both countries was caused by circumstances far different than ours.
The minute you challenge the assumption that the government should not spend when it has a large deficit, out comes the charge that we'll get some horrible hyperinflationary outcome like Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe.
Yes, once the economy gets to full employment, then extra government deficit spending can start driving up prices. But what happened in Weimar Germany was very different. During that time, the government was forced to pay extremely large war reparations in foreign currencies which it didn't have. So it had to aggressively sell its own currency and buy the foreign currency in the financial markets. This relentless selling continuously drove down the value of its currency, causing prices of goods and services to go ever higher in what became one of the most famous inflations of all time. By 1919, the German budget deficit was equal to half of GDP, and by 1921, war reparation payments represented one third of government spending. And guess what? On the very day that government stopped paying the war reparations and selling its own currency to buy foreign currency, the hyperinflation stopped.
In Zimbabwe, the situation is also very different from ours. There, the conditions for hyperinflation were caused by the destruction of nearly half of the country's domestic food production via misguided land reforms, plus a civil war which eliminated much of the economy's productive manufacturing capacity. In response to food shortages, the Bank of Zimbabwe used valuable foreign exchange reserves to buy imported food, leading to a lack of foreign currency to purchase essential raw materials. Manufacturing output collapsed, but the government used much of the remaining foreign exchange to dole out political favors, rather than adding to the country's productive capacity. The end result was inflation and then hyperinflation.
In the US, hyperinflation will not be an issue if the government spends while it has a large deficit because with high unemployment and unused yet functioning factories all across the country, there is plenty of room to cut taxes and/or increase spending to get us to full employment. This is true no matter what the size of the federal deficit. Ultimately, inflation (and then hyperinflation) is about competing distributive claims over real resources, such as oil, gas, water, etc. A "sustainable" fiscal policy, especially with respect to hyperinflationary risks, then, is really about both the establishment of full employment and the implementation of well-crafted policies which deal with the constraints created by, for example, depleting natural resources.
~Marshall Auerback, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and Rob Parenteau, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge
