The scourge of inflation means a tough year ahead for Europe

By Christian Odendahl: European economics editor, The Economist

INFLATION HAD been high for a while. But then, in the summer of 1922, prices started to climb dramatically. A loaf of bread that had cost 0.30 German marks in 1914 was selling for 8 marks in June 1922 and 160 marks by the end of that year. What followed in Weimar Germany was hyperinflation, which led to more than just the collapse of the currency. As Stefan Zweig, a novelist, put it in 1942, “nothing has made the German people so bitter, so hateful, so ripe for Hitler as inflation.”