The The French Revolution is just one of those things.

Started out as a pretty good idea, kick out all the inbred aristocrats and smelly kings enslaving the masses, devolved

into mob rule and a bunch of heads and gutters.

But it all managed to turn into a great Broadway musical. It's also the first

example in history of hyper-inflation. Hyper-inflation is different than

regular old garden variety inflation,

which is more like too big clumsy ships slowly drifting into each other. Not good,

but at least slow atrophy. Hyper-inflation occurs when inflation hits or exceeds 50% per month.

To put that in context, last year, inflation in the United States was about 4%.

We all thought that was too high.

That was for a whole year.

When your money drops half its value every month, you've entered hyper-inflation. And a good rule of thumb is, if the ink

or paper used to make your currency is more valuable than the currency itself, your

economy is in trouble. For example in Zimbabwe in 2008

inflation got so bad that at one point prices doubled every 24 hours. If bread costs $5 today, it costs $10 tomorrow and 20 the day after that

and 40 the day after that and so on. Inflation hit 79 Quintillion percent in Zimbabwe.

I had to learn that number Quintillion.

It's the thing that comes after billion.

That's how high inflation was over there.

Or another recent example, Venezuela.

Consumer prices increased by 65,000% in Venezuela from 2017 to 2018.

By 2020, some semblance of fiscal responsibility managed to stumble in,

...