Fighting Hyperinflations Around the World with Steve Hanke | Hoover Institution

There's no currency board that's ever failed. And that's including the one that Keynes designed and put in in North Russia in 1918 during the Civil War. So that one performed very well. There's no problem even with the North Russian currency board. So you get to the question, well, if these things never fail and perform well, why did they get started getting rid of them after the Second World War?

This is the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century podcast, an official podcast of the Hoover Institution's Economic Policy Working Group, where we talk about economics, markets, and public policy. I'm John Hadley, your host. Today, my guest is Steve Hanke. Steve is a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University. And he's the co-founder and the co-director of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise. He's one of the world's leading experts on monetary economics, exchange rate regimes, currency boards, and hyperinflation. Steve worked as a senior economist on President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors. He's advised governments and heads of state around the world. He played an important role in monetary and currency reforms in countries including Argentina, Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Ecuador, and Montenegro. Most recently, he's been appointed as a special advisor in Venezuela by a member of the National Assembly to work on monetary, economic, and energy issues. Steve is well known for his work measuring inflation, hyperinflation around the world, including the Hankey-Cruz World Inflation Table, one of the most comprehensive historical records of hyperinflation episodes. Steve, welcome to the podcast. It's an honor to have you on. Oh, great to be with you, Sean. So, see, tell us about your background. How did you get interested in becoming an economist and saying inflation and currencies? You've been named the money doctor in many times in the past. I think that's a moniker that stuck. Tell us about the laundry list of countries that you've worked with during your career and how you got into advising governments. on their monetary and currency reforms, particularly when they're facing episodes of big inflations or hyperinflations.

Okay, John. Well, let's go back to the first item, and that is how I got interested in economics. and decided to become an economist. To kind of fast forward, I actually consciously made a decision about that. I think I was probably a junior or senior in college at the time I decided I really wanted to become an economist. Going back to the beginning, I was engaged in economics essentially all my life. Starting at 10, I actually was supposedly assisting my grandfather in hedging eggs. He had a big egg camp. I grew up in farm country in Iowa, so... He had a big egg candling operation where you collect the eggs, you grade them, candle them, and so forth, store them until you get a semi full of eggs to ship back to New York or Boston. And there's price risk because the eggs in storage while you're collecting it The price is moving around. In those days, they had a contract for eggs on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. And if you