For the common man, economics is a dreary subject, a confusing litany of numbers spoken in a tongue he does not understand. He feels its effects in the shrinking of his wallet, the anxiety at the grocery store, and the vague sense that the foundations of his world are softening like sand beneath his feet. He has been told it is complex, that only experts can understand it. This is the great lie.
The truth is both simpler and far more terrifying. The collapse of money is the collapse of a people. It is the final symptom of a civilizational disease, a fever that burns away the past and leaves a blank slate for those who would build a new world upon the ashes of the old. A recent, monumental study by economists Steve H. Hanke and Nicholas Krus has provided us with the autopsy reports for 56 such collapses. Their work, ‘Routledge Handbook of Major Events in Economic History,’ particularly Chapter 30 on ‘Hyperinflations,’ is not merely an economic text. It serves as a grim anthology of what happens when a people lose control of their destiny.
The Alchemist’s Nightmare:
What Hyperinflation Really Is
Let us first dispel the clinical jargon. Hyperinflation is not merely “high inflation.” It is a economic runaway train, a psychic break in a nation’s financial soul. Technically, it begins when prices rise by over 50% in a single month. To grasp that, consider this: at that rate, the price of a loaf of bread would not double in a year, or even a month. It would double in a matter of days.
Your life’s savings, the money set aside for your child’s education or your retirement, would cease to buy a pair of shoes. Money transforms from a vessel of value into worthless paper, a cruel joke. Barter returns. People carry suitcases of cash for a meal. Society reverts to a primitive state, governed by pure survival instinct. Trust—in the government, in the future, in your neighbor—evaporates completely. This is not an economic adjustment; it is a spiritual apocalypse.
When money dies, it is not alone. It brings a world down with it.
The Grave Diggers:
The Real Causes of Collapse
The academic study lists the clinical causes: war, political mismanagement, transition from command economies. But we must look beyond the sterile terms to see the raw human and spiritual failing they represent.
War is the most obvious grave digger. But we must ask: what kind of war? Often, it is the fruit of globalist ambition, of empires clashing while the common man pays the price in blood and bankrupt currency. The treasure of a nation is poured into the insatiable maw of the war machine, financed not by taxes, but by printing press—a hidden tax on every citizen that destroys the value of every dollar they hold.
Political Mismanagement is the polite term for a ruling class that has abandoned its sacred duty to steward the nation. It is the obsession with utopian social engineering—whether the racial Marxism of DEI, the climate fanaticism of ESG, or the sheer, corrupt incompetence of a bureaucracy that exists only to perpetuate itself. It is the choice to sacrifice the economic health of the nation on the altar of a deranged ideology.
Transition from a Command Economy sounds benign. In practice, it often meant the looting of nations by global financial vultures. After the fall of communism, the peoples of the Soviet Union were promised freedom. What they received was “shock therapy”—a brutal, deliberate hyperinflation that wiped out the savings of an entire generation and allowed a handful of oligarchs, often in cahoots with Western banks, to seize the nation’s wealth for pennies on the dollar. It was economic murder, dressed up as economic theory.
The Great Reset Playbook:
Controlled Demolition
The pattern across all 56 collapses is too consistent to be accidental. Crisis is exploited. The existing system is deliberately overloaded and broken. Then, from the chaos, the “solution” is offered—always a new system that grants the architects more control.
Look at France in 1796. The revolutionary government first printed the assignat, which hyperinflated and collapsed. Their solution? Not a return to sound money, but the introduction of a new, even more volatile currency, the mandat. The same playbook is visible today. They talk of the dangers of cash, of the instability of the current system. Their proposed solution? Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Do not be fooled. CBDCs are not simply digital dollars or Euro’s. They are the ultimate control grid—programmable money that can be turned off if you dissent, expired if you don’t spend it correctly, and monitored by an all-seeing government. It is the mandat for the digital age.
This is the true purpose of engineering such collapses. It is not merely to transfer wealth, though that certainly happens. It is to conduct a controlled demolition of the existing order. Hyperinflation annihilates the middle class, the bedrock of any healthy nation. It destroys family savings, erodes faith in all institutions, and creates a terrified, desperate population that will beg for order and bread from any authority that promises it. It is the perfect crisis to justify the abolition of liberty in the name of security.
First, they melt the coins. Then, they melt the people.
The Antidote:
Sovereignty in a World on Fire
The lesson of these 56 collapses is not one of despair, but of clarity. The battle is not Left versus Right. It is the People versus the Globalist Machine. It is a spiritual battle for sovereignty.
The first fortress to defend is your own mind. Reject the nihilism and hedonism that is the “self-destruction virus.” Embrace discipline, tradition, and family. Strengthen your local community. Trust in your neighbor, not in a corrupt and distant bureaucracy.
The second is to understand sound money. Historically, gold and silver have been the bulwarks against the alchemist’s madness of paper currency. In our time, Bitcoin has emerged as a decentralized, hard-money alternative that cannot be inflated away by any central bank. It is a tool for those who wish to opt-out of the coming controlled demolition and preserve their wealth.
Finally, remember Fichte’s lesson: sovereignty begins with the word. Do not let them corrupt your language. Speak clearly and think deeply. Teach your children the true history of their people, not the globalist garbage served in schools. A people who have lost their language and their history are a people already conquered, merely waiting for the economic shock to finish the job.
The Ghosts of Nations Past:
A Chronicle of Economic Death
To read the Hanke-Krus table is to read a litany of national obituaries. The cold data is more powerful than any polemic. Consider these examples, not as dry statistics, but as monuments to the millions of lives shattered by this economic plague:
- Hungary (July 1946): The undisputed world record. Prices doubled every 15 hours. The monthly inflation rate was an incomprehensible 41.9 quadrillion percent. This is what total societal annihilation looks like on a chart.
- Zimbabwe (Mid-November 2008): A modern-day example. The government stopped publishing figures when inflation hit a “mere” 11 million percent. Independent analysis revealed the true peak: 79.6 billion percent per month, with prices doubling every day. This was the result of Mugabe’s regime seizing private farms and printing money to fund its tyranny.
- Yugoslavia (January 1994): A monthly rate of 313 million percent. The collapse of the multi-ethnic state into bloody sectarian war was accompanied and accelerated by the complete evaporation of its currency.
- Germany (October 1923): The classic example that paved the way for political extremism. A 29,500% monthly inflation rate destroyed the German middle class, creating the bitter, impoverished soil in which the seeds of National Socialism found fertile ground.
- Greece (October 1944): 13,800% monthly inflation during Nazi occupation. A stark reminder that war and currency collapse are inseparable twins.
- Republika Srpska (January 1994): An inflation rate of 297 million percent in a single month. A testament to how quickly and completely an economy can be erased during conflict.
- United States (The Future?): This column remains blank. But with a national debt soaring into the tens of trillions, a political class addicted to spending, and a central bank that has monetized that debt on an unprecedented scale, the ghost of Weimar haunts the corridors of Washington.
This is the globalists’ true “Great Replacement”—not just of people, but of entire economic realities, replacing stability with chaos and sovereignty with dependency. These 56 episodes are not random accidents. They are a pattern, a weapon.
The data compiled by Hanke and Krus—meticulously documented in the Routledge Handbook of Major Events in Economic History—is a warning etched in fire, a chronicle of 56 shattered worlds. We are not doomed to repeat this history if we have the courage to read it correctly and recognize the same patterns forming in our own time. The hyperinflationary impulse is growing in the West, driven by unsustainable debt and mad ideologies. The fire of the gods is being prepared. Our choice is whether we will be its fuel, or whether we will build a fireproof refuge of truth, tradition, and sound money for the remnant that will carry the flame of Western civilization through the coming long night.
