One of history's worst hyperinflations, and the program that ended it

Serbia's price charts in the early 1990s record one of the most extreme hyperinflations ever documented. Under international sanctions imposed over the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the government financed its budget deficit mainly by printing money, and monthly inflation crossed the conventional 50% hyperinflation threshold in February 1992. It then accelerated for 24 months, peaking in January 1994 at an officially recorded rate of roughly 313 million percent per month, a level researchers rank as the third-highest monthly peak of any hyperinflation on record, behind only Hungary's and Zimbabwe's. The episode ended abruptly: on January 24, 1994, the National Bank of Yugoslavia, under governor Dragoslav Avramović, launched a currency reform and stabilization program built around a new, more stable dinar and tight control of money issuance. Inflation collapsed almost immediately after the reform, though the program later came under strain as fiscal discipline slipped within about a year. The 1992-94 collapse and the Avramović program's partial success remain the reference point for why Serbia's long-run inflation chart looks essentially off-scale in the early 1990s compared with every later decade.