How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes

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Through a rowdy public campaign, the senators attacked 
retailers for “price gouging.” They claimed that fi shfl ation 
could be stopped if the greedy businesspeople would agree 
to price controls on products and services. But as these 
measures focused only on the symptoms of fi shfl ation, 
rather than the cause, they just 
made matters worse. 
Limiting what could be 
charged for a product 
without doing anything 
to control the 
decreasing value 
of money simply 
meant that 
manufacturers 
and retailers 
couldn’t 
make a profi t. 
As a result, 
they stopped 
selling and a 
black market of 
illegally high-priced 
merchandise arose.
Sensing the trouble with Fish Reserve Notes, some citizens 
tried to protect the value of their remaining savings by 
depositing fi sh in an offshore bank, where their savings would 
be protected from senatorial slicing and dicing.

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