Ours is a nation willfully lacking in knowledge and understanding of money; a cynic might think this lack of apprehension is by design. Money is seldom discussed in schools, popular media, or politics. And almost a century after the stark lessons of 1923 Germany, the West is convinced it can't happen here. In our overwhelming material abundance, aided by the natural deflationary pressures of markets, we simply have lost our ability to imagine a hyperinflationary scenario. Sure, there have been currency meltdowns since the two world wars in places like Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe, Bulgaria, and Argentina. Yes, Venezuela and arguably Turkey face currency crises today. But we need not worry about this, because modern central banks—especially the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank—have tamed inflation through sheer technocratic expertise and a willingness to use extraordinary monetary policy tools. Asset purchases and balance sheet expansion, ultralow or negative interest rates, and a determination to provide as much "liquidity" as an economy needs are the new normal for central bankers. Thanks to this open embrace of centrally planned money, former Fed chair (and likely future Treasury secretary) Janet Yellen assured us we need not expect another financial crisis in our lifetime.

To believe this, one has to believe policy is more important than production, and that an express policy of inflation is the mechanism to forestall too much inflation. This is a curious position. 

It's also a position sorely tested by the events of 2020. With governments across the world shutting down business, schools, and travel in response to covid, central banks have opened the floodgates of expansionary monetary policy like never before. Any slight tapering of the Fed's balance sheet, still swollen from the crash of '07, is now a pipe dream as it heads toward $10 trillion (Congress chipped in with its own $2.7 trillion fiscal stimulus bill, with another $1 trillion imminent). The fed funds rate is barely perceptible at 0.25 percent, and reserve requirements for banks are suspended since March. M1 money supply spiked precipitously, while Congress funded nearly half of 2020 federal spending with Treasury debt. Fed chair Jerome Powell now tells us the bank's sadistic 2 percent annual inflation target must average out over a period of years. In other words, we should expect (dubious official) inflation measures to run at 4 or 5 percent in coming years, to make up for the all the years when inflation supposedly was near zero.