From Cato at Liberty:
Most press reports about Zimbabwe’s fantastic hyperinflation are off the mark – way off the mark.
Even our most trusted news sources fail to get the facts right. This confirms the “95 Percent Rule”: 95 percent of what you read in the financial press is either wrong or irrelevant.
When it comes to the reportage about hyperinflation, there are no excuses. All 56 of the world’s hyperinflations have been carefully documented in “World Hyperinflations”. This record is available in the Routledge Handbook of Major Economic Events in Economic History (2013) and has been available online since 2012 at the Cato Institute.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is the main culprit, a prominent source of the faulty data.
Even The Economist magazine has fallen into the trap of uncritically accepting figures pumped out by the IMF and further propagating them. It’s no wonder that there is a massive gap between the public’s perception and economic reality. A gap that, ironically, The Economist reports on this week.
The Economist’s most recent infraction on Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation appeared in the May 2016 issue. The magazine claimed that the hyperinflation peaked at an annual rate of 500 billion percent. Where did this figure originate? You guessed it. That figure is buried in the IMF’s 2009 Article IV Consultation Staff Report on Zimbabwe.
In reality, Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate in September 2008 was 471 billion percent, not 500 billion percent. More importantly, Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation peaked in November, not September. It was then that Zimbabwe recorded the second-highest hyperinflation in history: a whopping 89.7 sextillion percent. This is 179 billion times greater than the IMF’s figure....MORE
