| Sumario: | "The long 20th century, from World War One to the early 21st century, has been a period of significant wealth creation and technological breakthroughs but also of booms followed by sharp contractions of output, investment and employment. This long century witnessed two world wars, the rise and fall of soviet type of socialism, episodes of hyperinflation, depression, stagflation, collapses of exchange rate regimes and a host of financial crises. Extreme monetary experiences were pervasive in different decades. There was hyperinflation in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Soviet Russia in the early 1920s, Greece and Hungary in the 1940s, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Nicaragua in the 1980s, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria in the 1990s, Zimbabwe in 2008 and Venezuela since 2017. The toll in terms of economic activity, investment and human welfare of these episodes was large. The US stock market crash of 1929 was followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s and then by World War II that entailed unprecedented destruction of human lives and physical assets and changed the geopolitical landscape of the world. Post-war reconstruction and recovery in the western world under US hegemony was followed by a sustained period of steady growth from around 1950 to 1973, the so-called "golden age of capitalism""--
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