Jan 4, 2021

Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe

Background, Impact, and Policy

Tara McIndoe-Calder, Tara Bedi and Rogelio Mercado

Hosted by Tim Jones

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Summary

In the wake of the 2008-09 financial crisis, Adam Fergusson's When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyperinflation became an unlikely publishing hit more than three decades after its release. Yet, even though few people knew the details of the 1923 crisis, stories and images from interbellum Germany are things of legend.

The same cannot be said of the many other hyperinflationary episodes in the past century and especially the two most severe: the first in postwar Hungary and the second just 13 years ago in Zimbabwe. Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe: Background, Impact, and Policy (Palgrave, 2019) investigates what drove a process that, at its peak, led to 80-billion-percent inflation and the death of the country’s money. Tara McIndoe Calder, who lived through the crisis and now works as an economist in Dublin, examines what happened in her homeland but also the wider meaning of hyperinflation, how to measure it accurately, its common causes and how to stop it.

Tara McIndoe Calder has been an economist at the Central Bank of Ireland since 2011 specialising in debt issues, after completing a PhD at Trinity College Dublin on money demand, aid shocks, and the impact of land reform in Zimbabwe.

*Her own book recommendations are Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez (Vintage, 2019), and both Half of a Yellow Sun and Americana by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate, 2014)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.