High Inflation Leads To Societal Collapse

The West has seen at least 4 periods of currency debasement lead to social unrest. With 4+ years of chronic, socially-destructive long-term unemployment in this country and even the president of the Philly Fed going on record saying that 3 years of Quantitative Easing will "end badly", the seeds of social unrest have been sewn here. What might we expect if/when inflation takes off in tandem with a depressed economy? SocGen's Dylan Grice gives us a glance through the prism of Western history:

Third Century Roman inflation (and implicit currency debasement) sparked a rapid turnover of emperors as the scapegoating over the systemic debasement saw Romans turned on Christians with a great violence which lasted throughout the period of the currency debasement but peaked with Diocletian's edict of 303 AD. The edict decreed, among other things, that Christian meeting places be destroyed, Christians holding office be stripped of that office, Christian freedmen be made slaves once more and all scriptures be destroyed. Diocletian's earlier edict, of 301 AD, sought to regulate prices and set out punishments for 'profiteers' whose prices deviated from those set out in the edict.

A similar dynamic seems evident during Europe's medieval inflations, only now, the confused and vain effort to make sense of the enveloping turmoil saw the blame focus on suspected witches. The following chart shows the UK price index over the period with the incidence of witchcraft trials. Note the peak in trials coinciding with the peak of the price revolution.

Were the same dynamics at work during the French Revolution of 1789? The narrative of Madame Guillotine and her bloody role is well known. However, the execution of royalty by the Paris Commune didn't begin until 1792, and the Reign of Terror in which Robespierre's Orwellian sounding 'Committee of Public Safety' slaughtered 17,000 nobles and counterrevolutionaries didn't start until well into 1793. In the words of guillotined revolutionary Georges Danton, this is when the French revolution 'ate itself'. But the coincidence of these events to the monetary debasement is striking. The political violence was justified in part by blaming nobles and counter-revolutionaries for galloping inflation in food prices.

However, the most tragic of all the inflations in my opinion, and certainly the starkest example of a society turning on itself was the German hyperinflation. Like other Axis countries on the wrong side of the War and now in the grip of hyperinflation, Germany turned viciously on its Jews. It blamed them for the surrounding evil as Romans had blamed Christians, medieval Europeans had suspected witches, and French revolutionaries had blamed the nobility during previous inflations.