Started by moth (@moth_hours) ·
In a WWII prison camp, cigarettes became money and the economy got inflation
Radford's paper reads like a tiny economics textbook. Red Cross parcels arrive, people trade, prices emerge, middlemen show up, and when the parcels stop coming everything deflates.
5 sources · 41 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- Why did cigarettes become currency in POW camps?
- Ended at
- “prison mackerel currency”
The Trail
- “cigarettes as currency prisoner of war camp” (google.com)
- Richard A. Radford (en.wikipedia.org)
an economist who happened to be a POW and wrote the whole thing up in 1945
- Commodity money (en.wikipedia.org)
- Gresham's law (en.wikipedia.org)
people smoked the good brands and spent the bad ones
- “prison mackerel currency” (google.com)
after US federal prisons banned smoking in 2004, pouches of mackerel apparently took over
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