 Hello, I am Mark Thornton, and this is another episode of Minor Issues, a mini-podcast from the Mises Institute. There's a lot of talk of inflation these days and how bad it is. And we certainly know how bad it is in terms of our purchasing power and how far our paycheck goes and the things that we've had to give up as a result of ever increasing prices in the economy. But most people don't understand how bad things can get, and all of the various aspects of the negative effects of monetary inflation on the economy. Today's episode is going to focus on how bad can it get. Basically, the Fed is telling us a story that inflation is falling, it's low, it's declining. But Austrian economists warn that inflation can go much higher based on the ideas and thinking of central bank policymakers at the Federal Reserve. Today's Wall Street Journal has a story on the front cover. It's kind of fun reading for Wall Street Journal readers. It's called, if a $100 trillion bill doesn't work, how about some cheese? And what they're talking about in this article is the hyperinflation in Zimbabwe in Africa, where the $100 trillion bill wasn't really worth very much because inflation had gotten so very high. In 2008, the inflation rate rose from 100,000% in a month to over 1 million percent a couple of months later and 250 million percent a couple of months after that. It was at this point after the government or the central bank in Zimbabwe created a hyperinflation that they decided to switch from their own currency to the U.S. dollar, which has been considered a relatively sound currency through the years. And as soon as they adopted the dollar, yes, inflation did fall, obviously because people were using dollars. And people in Zimbabwe would take their earnings in Zimbabwe dollars, they would take their paycheck, and they would immediately withdraw the whole thing in terms of U.S. dollars out of their own bank and put it in the NMB bank, which they sort of jokingly refer to as the National Mattress Bank. So nobody trusted the banks, nobody trusted the government because of the cruel hyperinflation that they had imposed on the people. So you have a situation where they suffered through hyperinflation, they switched to the dollar, but now they have a problem of no change in Zimbabwe. They would import dollars and other currencies, but they never imported coins denominated in U.S. dollars. So they didn't have pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters to make change. And so this imposed a severe problem on the economy. Businesses wanted to use dollars, they wanted to accept dollars, many of them wouldn't accept the old Zimbabwe dollars, but they didn't have anything to offer their customers in terms of change. And so the businesses, the gas stations, the restaurants, and so forth would issue their own personal IOUs, or they would offer in restaurants to customers extra containers of sauce. And some restaurants and convenience stores would actually offer slices of cheese and hard-boiled eggs instead of change proper. And, you know, I love hard-boiled eggs, but I would be quite surprised if that's what I got in change from a normal transaction. And of course not everybody likes hard-boiled eggs or slices of cheese. And the Wall Street Journal article looks at an interview they did with somebody from Zimbabwe who was receiving these paper IOUs in change from making purchases. And she had the trouble of, you know, just sticking the IOU in your pocket and then finding it a week later in the daily laundry, all crinkled up and erased as a result of the washing process. So, you know, this is how bad inflation can get. This is how it can directly impact your circumstances and your day-to-day lives. And so when we emphasize on this program the difficulties of inflation, we're trying to highlight some of the difficulties that producers and entrepreneurs face. But ultimately it has an impact on everyday ordinary consumers that we're most concerned about and which the central bank, the federal government, the national government, the president, they don't really have any concern with that. They fully support the monetary policy regime that has been printing up zillions of dollars and leading to very high rates of inflation in the United States. But today's episode points out that things still can get much worse.