When it diverged greatly from the text on page 42 above, the original article ‘Inflation as a Method of Taxation’ concluded as follows:

This is another way of putting what economists mean by the velocity of circulation increasing when a currency loses credit. The public try to protect themselves in this way when they have been convinced by experience that their money is always falling in value and that every holder of it loses.

These theoretical considerations are of the utmost practical importance at the present time, because several currencies have now entered on this second phase. In the last stages of inflation the prodigious increase in the velocity of circulation may have more effect in raising prices and depreciating the exchanges than the increase in the volume of notes; and the note-issuing authorities cry out against what they regard as the unfair phenomenon of the value of the notes falling more than in proportion to their increased volume.

In Moscow the unwillingness to hold money except for the shortest possible time reaches a fantastic intensity. If you buy a pound of cheese in a grocer's shop, the grocer runs off with the roubles as fast as his legs will carry him to the Central Market to replenish his stocks by changing them into cheese again, lest they lose their value before he gets there. This is what keeps the new bourgeoisie so thin, and justifies the prevision of economists in naming the phenomenon ‘velocity of circulation’.