Great quotes about inflation

"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." — Milton Friedman

"Everyone loves an early inflation. The effects at the beginning of an inflation are all good. There is steepened money expansion, rising government spending, increased government budget deficits, booming stock markets, and spectacular general prosperity, all in the midst of temporarily stable prices. Everyone benefits, and no one pays. That is the early part of the cycle. In the later inflation, on the other hand, the effects are all bad. The government may steadily increase the money inflation in order to stave off the later effects, but the later effects patiently wait. In the terminal inflation, there is faltering prosperity, tightness of money, falling stock markets, rising taxes, still larger government deficits, and still roaring money expansion, now accompanied by soaring prices and ineffectiveness of all traditional remedies. Everyone pays and no one benefits. That is the full cycle of every inflation. " - Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German and American Inflations by Jens O. Parsson


"Inflation profiteering had consisted of borrowing paper marks, converting them into goods and factories, and then repaying the lenders with depreciated paper. It was a process of which both Kutisker and the Barmats were pastmasters. Deflation profiteering, whose possibilities these Lithuanians (unlike Stinnes) rapidly saw, consisted of selling everything available for the new stable marks and — in this period of the tightest imaginable credit — lending the proceeds at extravagant rates of interest. " -When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Collapse
by Adam Fergusson


"I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments."- Friedrich August von Hayek

"Inflationism, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is only one piece in the total framework of politico-economic and socio-philosophical ideas of our time. Just as the sound money policy of gold standard advocates went hand in hand with liberalism, free trade, capitalism and peace, so is inflationism part and parcel of imperialism, militarism, protectionism, statism and socialism." - Ludwig Von Mises

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves." - Alan Greenspan

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered." - Thomas Jefferson