Professor Steve Hanke Explains Hyperinflation

Steve Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins and head of Cato’s Troubled Currencies Projects, is an Austrian—but he’s an Austrian who looks at markets first and foremost. He also thinks QE was the right thing for the Fed to do in 2008, Austrians are all wrong to focus on the Fed’s balance sheet instead of the M4 “broad money” supply, and US debt is a more distant worry than the risk posed by Trump’s tariffs.

An expert on currencies and inflation, Professor Hanke joins the show to explain what’s happening in places like Venezuela and Turkey. How and why do currencies fail, and how can hyperinflation be prevented without bailouts by the IMF? What can stop the vicious cycle of printing money to pay bills when no tax base exists? And what do recent past examples in Bulgaria, Russia, and Yugoslavia teach us?