See the article for a description of each.
- Non-inflationary price increases
- Simple inflation
- Loss of confidence in money
- Hyperinflation, and finally
- Currency destruction.
Rather than seeing a single "inflationary spectrum", I instead see two quite distinct inflationary forces - one that is exponential, and one that is hyperbolic. Let's briefly take a look at an exponential and hyperbolic functions (graphs):
The shapes, slopes, and positioning of the graphs come in many forms. The key difference between exponential and hyperbolic, as explained by Wikipedia, is that:
- exponential growth grows to infinity as time goes to infinity (but is always finite for finite time),
- hyperbolic growth has a singularity in finite time (grows to infinity at a finite time).
Put another way, hyperbolic growth trajectories have a D-Day - a day of reckoning.
Now, relating this back to inflation, I have a crude (yet instructive) Inflation formula: