Palgrave Inflation, Its Victims, and Its Profiteers: Four Millennia of Crises and Stabilizations

Inflation, Its Victims, and Its Profiteers examines four millennia of monetary turbulence to show that inflation is neither modern nor mysterious—merely humanity's oldest recurring argument between what things cost and what people will accept. Tracing price instability from Mesopotamian grain edicts to twenty-first-century currency crises, the book identifies the patterns that connect ancient debasement, wartime finance, and contemporary policy failures. Economic incentives, political pressures, and the enduring irrationality of human behaviour collectively shape every inflationary episode — and history suggests today's are no more unprecedented than they feel. Seven sections move from conceptual foundations to forensic case studies: how industries from automotive manufacturing to oil have adapted; how criminal networks thrive in inflationary environments; how professions insulate themselves from monetary erosion; how central banking, dollarization, and digital currencies have each promised stability with mixed results. The centrepiece surveys inflation crises across civilisations — Mesopotamia to modern Latin America — before a closing chapter projects likely trajectories in developed economies over the next quarter-century. A book for anyone who suspects that rising prices deserve more than a newspaper column — and that the past has rather more to say about the present than policymakers prefer to admit.