Inflation is an old scourge. History reveals its devastating consequences time and again. The same story is ever repeated: armies that allow rulers to rule, and armies need money to buy the weapons and pay the troops. However, once you have an army, and rule a society, commandeering its money supply is as simple as it is elementary. And, thus, inflation follows like the predictable hangover after a night of inebriated excess. The Roman Empire showed us how it’s done.

Between the regimes of Augustus and Diocletian Roman troop numbers more than doubled: from 250,000 to 600,000. An indication of the degree to which inflation funded this massive military is the fate of the Roman currency, the denarius. It was so utterly debased by a long string of Roman rulers that adidas superstar saldi , when Diocletian came to power, the formerly silver coin was reduced to a copper plated token. By A.D. 268 it had fallen to one five-thousandth of its original value. Roman trade was already deteriorating into barter. Meanwhile, the middle class was rapidly eroding.

Diocletian recognized the heavy toll of centuries of inflation through the abuse of the fiat currency. In an effort to build up the Empire’s coffers, he decreed payment of taxes be in goods. Furthermore, in an ill-conceived effort to address the effects rather than the cause of Rome’s chronic economic malaise, all manner of price, wage, production and

One always wants to avoid overly simple explanations for major historical events, but there can be no question that the fall of Rome has to be in some serious measure attributed to the centuries of economic malaise incurred by the debased fiat currency. Indeed, the common practice of portraying the barbarian invasions as a conquest is a bit misleading. For the majority of the Roman lower class – a category into which much of the middle class had fallen – the sackers of Rome were not conquers adidas neo scarpe uomo , but liberators