Jeopardy’s flawed understanding of inflation

Should we call this reverse monetarism?

An “answer” on the July 1 episode of Jeopardy was the following:

In the 1940s, this country’s Magyar Nemzeti Bank printed the million-billion pengo note to combat inflation.

The participants were expected to say, and one of them did, “What is Hungary?”

The problem, of course, is that you don’t fight inflation by adding a huge amount to the money supply; that causes more inflation. The people coming up with the clues are obviously smart and I don’t expect them to know much about economics, but how could you possibly think that printing more money “fights” inflation instead of increasing it? I don’t understand their mental model.

One of my favorite articles on hyperinflations is, unsurprisingly, the one I ordered for myself Concise encyclopedia of economics.

It’s Michael K. Salemi, “Hyperinflation.” Note that in the third paragraph he discusses the Hungarian inflation that Jeopardy alluded to. This was substantially more extreme than the German hyperinflation of 1921 to 1923.