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Posted by: -DS-

From the article Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe:

Am I the only one who finds this funny?

Posted by: Somey

You mean the "citation needed" part? No...

Despite that, a citation would probably be a good thing there, if only for the sake of appearances. You wouldn't think there'd be a shortage of them either, though finding one that summarizes the situation that neatly might be a problem.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

If there is WiFi in Heaven, I am sure Ian Smith is having a good chuckle.

Posted by: It's the blimp, Frank

Along with all the media-controlling, corruption-perpetuating governments in the northern hemisphere who will never have these facts mentioned in Wikipedia, because it is sourced to the very media they are controlling.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Except for the idiotic editorializing, that's not a bad article. Although I think it should probably be put into a single article with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic. Mugabe's government didn't invent it.

Posted by: Detective

Indeed, as Wikipedia points out, Hungary experienced the most serious hyperinflation ever recorded. Inconsistently, the article is not called "Hyperinflation in Hungary" but Hungarian pengő (T-H-L-K-D). Go figure. However, while the German and Hungarian episodes were contemporary and arose from broadly similar causes, the factors behind the Zimbabwean situation were very different. So maybe it deserves a separate article.

What surprises me is that the inbuilt liberal bias in Wikipedia would surely encourage the whitewashing of references to Mugabe, that great liberator of an African country from Imperialistic British rule.

Posted by: Zoloft

I'm a liberal. I think Mugabe should have breakfast with the Navy Seals.

Posted by: Somey

The right-wing liberator, you mean? I dunno, the article is really more about hyperinflation, not Mugabe himself. Hyperinflation... that's a conservative thing. Liberals don't like to print money, they prefer to get it from rich people.

Posted by: everyking

The commentary is gone now. Why didn't someone just remove it before?

Posted by: Michaeldsuarez

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe&diff=425369536&oldid=424518519:



It was added in as a part of an university project.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Mod note: I moved some off-topic squabbling to http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=34992&view=findpost&p=285231.

BTW, I hope someone is doing some preparatory work for the [[Hyperinflation in Europe]] article.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

That's an interesting point, Ottava, because in point of fact, money is solely connected to the government and not intrinsic representation of people's work and effort. The bizarre doctrine of monetarism has become hegemonic in Europe and North America, and people have come to believe that an economy is all about money, which presumably was to delivered to us by God in the form of some sort of primeval stash guarded by Nibelungs. No, Ottava, in reality, money is simply a political creation of governments. Except that lately, they have farmed out that authority to central banks, who are busily cooking up the mother of all hyperinflationary binges right now as we speak.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

In what sense is what remains "on topic?"

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Mod's note: point taken. The latest digression, including material on glass beads as medium of exchange, has been moved http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=34993&hl=.

Posted by: communicat

The article also says (contradictorily): "Zimbabwe's government ranks 134th of 176 in terms of institutionalized corruption."

134th of 176 countries? That's a fairly good rating by world standards. Certainly not consistent with allegation of "perpetuating corruption".

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

It should also be noted that the source for the corruption allegations is Transparency International, affiliated with the Crown Agents Foundation and generally regarded as a British Intelligence asset. Countries that don't play ball with the Empire are accused of all sorts of corruption and human rights problems. Countries that do play ball are curiously exempt.

Posted by: radek

Even if that's true the index is composed by surveys of non-British Intelligence agencies (at least not obviously). So unless you think they explicitly monkey with the response data, it probably accurately reflects what these organizations actually think.



Lol. No, it's not. It's just not "the worst of the worst".

I do think that Russia's very low rating (below Zimbabwe) is bunk though.

Posted by: radek

Why? Compared to US, Europe has always had very low inflation (a legacy of the super inflation adverse Bundesbank) so now that they're reaching the super crazy level of ... 2.5%, it's gonna be hyperinflation? Don't think so. Hell, they're probably a percent point or two away from an optimal level.

This is what I don't get: at a time when inflation is at a lowest point in US (and only slightly higher in Europe) since the Great Depression all these people are running around screaming about "hyperinflation" (something usually defined as more than 50% per month - annualized that's a rate of 8650% per year ... compare that to the measly 2.5% Europe has now). Perry is threatening Bernanke about printing money ... something weird's going on. Inflation's about the last of our worries now.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

Indeed, anyone with any sense at the moment is becoming very concerned about deflation. The prices of virtually all durable goods in the US, not to mention homes, have plummeted in the past 24 months; the only thing that's keeping CPI growth positive are skyrocketing energy prices (largely driven by the BP oil spill) and fairly strong food prices (due largely to ongoing wheat failures in India and the depletion of corn reserves for fuel ethanol production). Hyperinflation may be bad, but a deflationary spiral is far far worse.

Posted by: radek

You're right in general but wrong in one particular detail - energy prices are not included in CPI. I'd have to look up the details to be sure but I'm guessing that in addition to food (which you are right about), it's medical costs that are keeping it at one-half-of-one-percent or so (again - compare that to the historical post war average inflation for US of about 5% and wonder why people are bitchin' about Bernanke printing money at this particular point in time)

Btw, the Wikipedia article on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_price_index is another example of a horrible economics article.

(Quick clarification - price of gas is in CPI but by itself does not have a high enough weight to account for much of it)
(Quick clarification 2 - actually scratch that. I was thinking - for completely unrelated reasons - of Core CPI. The most often quoted CPI does have energy prices in it)

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t01.htm

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Two points in response: the statistics on inflation, like those for unemployment, are "cooked." For example, food and energy costs, where you do see substantial inflation right now, are simply discarded from the statistics because they are supposedly "volatile." For the average person, food and energy costs are becoming an existential question. Regarding hyperinflation, the danger comes from the combination of "quantitative easing" (sounds like a laxative, doesn't it? Gentle relief, no doubt) and the massive leveraging that is incorporated in the just-announced European bailout scheme. Debt is being created at a pace that physical production cannot possibly keep up with. Therein lies the danger.


Don't worry -- contrary to the fantasies of the monetarists, you can have both. If you continue to shut down physical production to feed a speculative bubble, you will.

Posted by: radek

That's just not true. Food prices are most definitely in the index - and have a pretty hefty weight in it (around 40%). For energy costs gasoline and some household energy prices are also included and have a moderate weight (which reflects the share of income spent on such things by the median household). So an inflation rate of 0.5% has all that in there. More specifically, inflation in food prices overall has been around ... 0.5% lately, down from about 4.4% about a year ago (that's that "volatility). Please pay attention to where the period is in those numbers. Inflation in gasoline prices has been a little bit higher at 1.7%.

Ummm, do I really need to compare these numbers (0.5, 1.7 ... even the 4.4) with 8500?

You can try to make the term "quantitative easing" sound scary by comparing it to laxatives, but in the present situation there's just no way in the world it can cause ... even moderate inflation (say, more than 15%), never mind "hyperinflation" (again, 8500+%)

What you're basically saying is that, if I'm traveling at 10 miles per hour and I apply gentle pressure to the gas pedal, I need to be careful or I'll end up http://cdn2.screenjunkies.com/wp-content/uploads/images/2010/back-to-the-future-delorean.jpg. Ok, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it still doesn't make sense. Where where all these fears of hyperinflation when US inflation rate was at the insanely high level of 5% a couple years back?



I still am trying to understand what monetarists (whom there aren't that many around these days) or monetarism has to do with this. If anything, monetarists were generally known for being "inflation nutters", a malady which this latest seems to be an even more severe case of (like common cold vs. influenza)

And just to explain a little bit more, the reason why "volatile" food and energy prices are excluded from the Core CPI index (not the one I'm talking about above) is because they are in fact volatile and tend to be determined in international markets - hence they have little to do with a particular country's (or economically integrated region's like Euro) own monetary policy (at least at short and medium frequencies)

Also the "quote" thing is not working for some reason

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Monetarists believe that changes in money supply causes an economy to "slow down" or "speed up," that that therefore you cannot possibly have a simultaneous depression and inflation (which is why they go "tilt" over such a thing as stagflation.) The basic incompetence of their theory stems from an unwillingness or inability to distinguish between productive and non-productive investment.

Posted by: Detective

It means it's in the bottom quarter of all countries. To describe that as "a fairly good rating" is surely to demonstrate a certain degree of complacency.

Posted by: radek

You're confusing Keynesians and Monetarists. Monetarists - or at least one of them, Milton Friedman - were ones who predicted that such a thing as stagflation would occur if ad-hoc Keynesian policies were followed.

Monetarists were pretty broad school (basically having in common the focus on the role of money supply in an economy) but at least in the Miltonian variety were very very anti-inflation, argued that any stimulus that an expansion of the money supply can provide is to be short lived, of uncertain duration and magnitude and probably badly timed - hence they advocated "monetary rules", where the money supply just grows at a constant rate (perhaps 0, perhaps <0, perhaps >0). Most common monetary rule proposed was to have money grow at the same rate as long run growth rate of real output, which would keep prices stable, but at various times Friedman even argued for slight deflation. At the end of the day he thought it didn't matter as long as the rule was known and predictable.


And all "mainstream" economic theories distinguish between productive investment and "non-productive" or financial, investment. The two are linked though, right?

Posted by: communicat

Okay, change that to "comparatively" good rating.

Posted by: communicat

Phew! All this impressive economic jargon. The short and comparatively jargon-free version is that Western economies are in crisis because of contradictions inherent in the capitalist system. Britain, meanwhile, is in deep shit because it can no longer plunder its former colonies as openly and lucratively as it has done in the past. As for America: it would have been down the drain-hole already, were it not for communist China buying up US bonds. What does all this have to do with inflation in Zimbabwe? Not much.

Posted by: radek

Lol. As opposed to the lack of such inherent contradictions in communist system. Which is why there's still so many of them around.

And China is "communist" in name only. They're all capitalists now.

Posted by: communicat

You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about. Your misperceptions are so firmly entrenched it would be a waste of time and effort for me to even try to enlighten you. Stick to WP. They generously hand out medals for brainwashed, blinkered and uniformed viewpoints such as yours.

Posted by: Vigilant

What's your beef with his comment?

A) There are no contradictions in communism
B) They are not all capitalists now?

Posted by: communicat

A) Yes and No. Communism is not homogeneous. Interpretation and application of Marxism-Leninism differs in different parts of the world. Cuban communism e.g. is very different from Pol Pot's version. etc.
B) No. They are certainly not "all capitalists now."
C) I'm not gonna waste my time here by being drawn into a fractious off-topic argument with people who've already made up their minds -- or rather, who've been spoon-fed to have their minds made up for them by the mass media including WP. I did state here my (on-topic) view of American ideology. It was swiftly and predictably moved to the annex/tar-pit. I might consider engaging with/enlightening you and/or others if you wanna start an appropriate topic related directly to any specific WP article relative to the above now off-topic issues. The WP "article" on "Soviet propaganda" e.g. might be a good place to start. If not, have a good day anyway.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Keynes and Friedman are simply two sides of the same coin. Even Wikipedia acknowledges this, after a fashion:



While the Keynesians and Friedmanites continuously bark at each other, they become allies against the American school of Hamilton, Carey, List, Lincoln and FDR.

Posted by: radek

Well, they may be two sides of the same coin but one is definitely "tails" ("you shouldn't monkey with the money supply because it will cause inflation with few if any gains in output") and the other one is "heads" ("if you increase the money supply the economy will improve with few if any adverse effects on inflation").
(I've never quite understood that analogy - two sides of the same coin are still two different sides)



I don't even know who List is. Of the other 3 only Carey was an economist. FDR was certainly influenced by Keynesian ideas. Hamilton and Carey were characterized essentially by protectionism, afaik.

What do any of them have to do with inflation? Which is looking even lower after latest numbers. Which means even less than one half of one percent. So again, not anywhere near ... never mind hyperfinlation, not anywhere near 10%. Which means it's the lowest since the Great Depression. As Kelly says, it's deflation that's a potential problem. So again, why is everyone running around worrying about a very-slightly-expansionary monetary policy?

Posted by: Vigilant

You didn't answer the question. I'll help out. There are contradictions in all theories of government.



They certainly are all capitalists in Shanghai and Beijing from what I saw. The poeple in thej countryside that I met all wanted to move to the big cities and "get some".

Perhaps I frequented the wrong hole-in-the-wall coffee shops.
I did wear a Che Guevara TShirt, thought mostly for irony that nobody got.



You sound more like Ottava every day.

Posted by: communicat

"Vigilant" sounds more like Radek every day. I guess he's just another of those individuals whom GlassBeadGame has described very aptly elsewhere as: ".... all the Wikipedians around here. Backsliding Wikipedians. Unredeemed Wikipedians. Trolling Wikipedians ... They own the place (WR) now and bring every feud vendetta and dysfunction from the mothership."

By the way, capitalism is not a "theory of governance". It's an economic system. Cretino.

Posted by: Vigilant

Well, when you can't win the argument, throw crap and run.

Posted by: Milton Roe

The contradictions are worse in Marxism since Marx himself is full of many major contradictions. For example, his "surplus-labor" theory of capitalist exploitation has a major hole in it would Marx put there himself: gains in efficiency in production naturally result in far less labor necessary to produce goods (as Marx expends many chapers to say), and thus the amount of labor which goes into an equation of value (if any) must be a sort of "socially necessary labor time" which takes competence and mechanization into account, and not simply "labor-power." But Marx cheats later and doesn't want to pay for competence or mechanization per se. He makes it clear that he regards profit due from reducing "socially necessary labor time" to be all morally due to the laborer, and none of it due to those who own better tools (or factories-- it's merely a matter of scale). Or who own intellectual property of how to increase productivity, having thought of it, or discovered it through their own work. Marx thinks it is fair if laborers who "work smarter" profit, but not fair if they only tell other laborers how to "work smarter." Marx cannot think of a moral way that a laborer might pay for an idea or rental or a machine.

In Marxism, a laborer who creates a better tool to do something, or thinks of a more efficient way to do something, has no way to sell or rent those real or intellectual goods to other laborers who do not have them. He is only free to apply them to his own labor, where they appear to produce the "socially necessary labor time" to produce the good. As soon as he attempts to sell, license, or rent ways to be more efficient to other laborers, he becomes a "capitalist" who is profeteering from the "suplus value" that the extra efficiency creates from that labor power, all of which Marx thinks should always go to the laborer! And which otherwise is essentially stolen by those who think of a better loom, or who actually construct one, and find some way to reap some of the rewards from this without doing all of the labor themselves.

Ridiculous!

Posted by: Vigilant

I do not disagree with you. I'm not a communist and don't have any dog in the fight other than calling out obvious hypocrisy on the part of Ottava and Communicat (for the lulz!).

However, I would like to point out a contradiction in the other extreme whereby business buys patents that it did not create, that it does not practice and uses these patents to extort (there's really no other way to look at it) money via threats of legal action from companies that actually do increase the overall productivity of each individual worker.

The fact that these parasites (they are not contributors nor are they epiphytes) exist and are supported, legally, within the confines of capitalism, yet raise the cost to acquire efficiency must be viewed as a contradiction and as a contra indicator of the internal coherency of our current system.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

The idea that "FDR was certainly influenced by Keynesian ideas" is a common but pernicious misconception. FDR did not do indiscriminate Keynesian "money pumping" -- he used a dirigist policy of targeting investment into sectors that would cause an accelerating increase in the physical output of the economy. (The Wikipedia article on "dirigisme" has a certain amount of idiocy mixed with fact, so beware.) FDR and Keynes were adversaries in the discussions of the post-WWII order.

List is Friedrich List. Take a second look at Hamilton -- I think you may have missed something.



Economist Stefan Homburg said Thursday in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung:
The central banks are not pouring money into consumer lending, and certainly not into productive activity. They are pouring it into the bailout of investment banks and related gambling entities. Nothing could be more inflationary.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

If I didn't know that this thread has been twice purged of "off topic" stuff I'd swear it was just a place for internet hacks to voice their sundry crank views. Nothing brings them out like a nation with a flawed black leader and tossing around meaningless "socialism." Just that lately people haven't looked all the way to Africa for this kind of thing.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Which is where we part company. You think that investment banks do nothing productive, but are merely ways of creating games of chance to shuffle money around between players who do nothing but guess. Like Las Vegas casinos.

However, since all advanced countries have banks with investment-banking capabilities, whether specialized or not, clearly this activity DOES something helpful to an economy. If this function is allowed to implode at a specialist bank like Lehman Bros or Bear Sterns, it would have be reinvented (or continued) at mixed banks like Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and UBS (which never had to contend with US banking regularions about keeping investing and commercial activities separate).

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

And that, as one clever fellow recently pointed out to the benighted Will Beback, is a case of cum hoc ergo propter hoc. I might also add that it is those countries which have been regarded as "advanced" that are presently going down for the third time, whereas those dirty, grubby little countries like China and Argentina are surging ahead.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Are you including Germany and Switzerland? You think they did no investment banking?

China and Argentina both have economies that are slowing down. And for all of that, both countries need investment banking services now, and will in the future:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2011/06/03/2003504817

http://www.bnamericas.com/news/banking/Itau_BBA_aims_to_become_one_stop_shop_next_year

Posted by: radek

Let's suppose for the sake of argument that what you say here is correct. This still doesn't change the fact that "Monetarists" - which is who you brought up first - are NOT big fans of "money pumping", and that you were confusing them with Keynesians.




Who? But ok, even if that can be true sometimes - we're still orders of magnitude off from anything resembling hyperinflation.

And it also leaves my previous question unanswered - why now? We have the lowest rate of inflation since the Great Depression, and it's not like the Fed hasn't used expansionary monetary policy before (many times to a much larger extent). If the ketchup bottle metaphor applies now, then it surely applied before. So why all the hoopla now?

How exactly are the central banks "bailing out investment banks and related gambling entities"? They're buying bonds like they're always done when expanding liquidity, just with a different purpose.

Anyway, theory aside, you want to make a bet on this? We can come back here a year from now. I say that by October 2012 there will have been no hyperinflation in either US or Europe. Hell, I'll even bet on the fact that the inflation rate will not have reached 10% at any point in either US or Europe.

(of course crazy things could happen, but you can't predict the unpredictable. Who knows, maybe Perry will get elected and take over the Fed or something)

Posted by: communicat

Meanwhile, back in southern Africa, we're laughing all the way to the bank as the world jettisons dollars and sterling, and buys safe-haven gold. Thank you America and Europe. And a special thanks from Robert Mugabe as well. (We wonder where Jimbo's gonna get the bucks to pay for his next generation of servers).

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Mod's note: cage match moved to http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=35022&pid=285500&st=0&#entry285500.

Posted by: communicat

Unless I've missed something, I still don't see how 90 percent of the surviving content in this thread has anything at all to do with Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe.

Posted by: Detective

Yes, you're technically correct there. Any country that isn't the worst country in the world has a good rating compared to the very worst one.


OK, I'll buy it. What sort of uniforms do viewpoints wear?



Post hoc ergo propter hoc?

Posted by: Milton Roe

Hershel's is the porn version.

Posted by: communicat

Got anything sensible to say about Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe? I thought not.

"Destroy it's sophistry and wit in vain,
The creature's at its dirty work again."
-- Alexander Pope

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Mod's note: this thread has spawned an exceptional number of digressions. http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=35106&hl=