ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 looks at individual episodes of hyperinflation or high inflation that occurred in different locations in Europe and Asia at different stages of the Second World War. Unlike the first wave of hyperinflation, the countries hit by hyperinflation during the WWII-era shared little commonality in terms of their economic and political systems, except perhaps that some had a paper currency regime. The effects of war, the weakened function of the governments, and in some cases, the emerging role played by perhaps initially somehow inexperienced Americans who were on the way to lead postwar world reconstruction are shown to be starkly visual in many of the episodes discussed. In an apparent “political vacuum,” the world record of hyperinflation was created in Hungary in 1946, as the laws of economics inexorably unfolded.
