I grew up among relatives from Germany who told me about the 1923 hyperinflation. One gave me a 50.000 mark note which I still have along with German postage overstamped `250 Tausend’ & `3 Millionen’, etc.
I’ve read a lot about 1923 since then & I wonder if that could ever happen here, or were the circumstances post-1918 unique to the German economy with reparations & forfeiture of gold reserves?
Meanwhile the Reichsbank printed money like no tomorrow until rational minds created the Rentenmark & the currency mostly stabilized by 1925 or so.
The only American counterpart has to have been the devaluation & ultimate worthlessness of Confederate currency & bond issues.
Actually worse on a pct basis than the hyperinflation of Weimar was the hyperinflation in Yugoslavia in 1993. If “recency” counts for anything.
A person can choose a collection of facts and further choose to align them in a way that tells a story of sorts. I am not confident that anyone can depict the nature of events that would obtain were the US to enter a phase of total chaos like 1921-1923 Germany.
Under the topic of “nobody can predict the future”, there is no doubt that the Fed has created a lot of money over the past half dozen years, but it is in large part accounted for. One school of thought says gold’s runup to $1900 anticipated what the Fed/Tsy has/have done.
Other than the “gun” thing, forget not that if gold really did what the bugs say it might, then an ounce of gold goes to...$50,000? You paid $1200 for it. The government will very likely want their ~~~50% of your gain, state and Fed. So you would owe 1/2*$48,800. still a great deal if you own it for $1200, I guess. They could impose a massively punitive tax on such sales, say 80%. Then what? A black market would emerge, and sellers of gold would get 15-35% of value. My point is that just because you hold something in your hand doesn’t mean that you own it. Just because you hold something in your hand does not mean you can transact it at a price resembling market value...especially if the market goes away. It may well have been that a chunk of gold in 1923 Germany accelerated in value 10,000%. it could equally be that your formerly friendly neighbors would pound your head in and take it away from you if they were starving to death and had the slightest inkling you had it.