Costantino Bresciani-Turroni was an Italian economist that lived between 1882 and 1963. He’s famous for being an anti-fascist intellectual and a proponent of free-market economics.

But more importantly, he wrote a book called The Economics of Inflation, which is widely regarded as the definitive book on Germany’s experience with hyperinflation between 1919 and 1923.

Bresciani-Turroni spent most of his life as a professor. But after teaching statistics at the University of Palermo and Genoa, he was recruited by the Italian Ministry of Affairs as a delegate to the Reparation Commission to Germany. The Allied forces of World War 1 punished the German people for sparking the war and demanded reparations from the Allied nations for the destruction caused. These reparations were established through the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919, and Bresciani-Turroni was part of the apparatus meant to collect the reparation payments.

I read the book over the past week to get an insight into how infl…