Steve Hanke

In January 2022, Hanke co-authored a working paper arguing that lockdowns had ‘little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality’ but had ‘devastating’ effects on society. It was cited by conservative news website Fox News, which stated that "lockdowns should be rejected out of hand". The paper was criticized as being "fundamentally flawed" by various medical experts and labelled as "misleading" by fact checker Health Feedback while epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz tweeted that it was "a very weird review paper." PolitiFact concludes Hanke "has repeatedly elevated false claims about the pandemic", citing his previous remark on Twitter that lockdowns and vaccine policies are "fascist". An op-ed on the Chicago Tribune also called the paper "as scientific as a Joe Rogan rant."

Hanke is a senior advisor at Renmin University's International Monetary Research Institute, in association with Nobel laureate Robert Mundell (- April 2021) of Columbia.

In June 2020, Hanke wrongly tweeted that Vietnam was among the “rotten apples” of coronavirus data after misattributing the country's zero death count as "No Data Reported." After much outcry on social media and a petition to Johns Hopkins University signed by nearly 300 Vietnamese academics demanding an apology, Hanke issued a correction on Twitter stating that the country has a "perfect" record in its fight against coronavirus. The original tweet was also deleted. In an interview with Voice of America (VOA) following the controversy, Hanke admitted that Vietnam's response to the pandemic was indeed "excellent," and he cited the country's poor record of press freedom as reasons behind his initial suspicion of its coronavirus data.

Hanke also serves on the supervisory board of AMG (Advanced Metallurgical Group, N.V.), which was the best performing stock on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in 2017, with its market capitalization increasing by 201%. In May 2019, Hanke was appointed chairman of AMG's supervisory board. In the past, he has served on the board of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the National Bank of Kuwait's International Advisory Board, which was chaired by Sir John Major.

The LFMI immediately arranged for Hanke and Schuler to publish a book in Lithuanian, Valiutu Taryba: Pasiulymai Lietuvai. Their book contained a currency board blueprint for the country. This measure was adopted in April 1994, linking the Lithuanian litas to the German Mark at a fixed exchange rate. Following the introduction of the euro, the litas was linked to the euro, until January 1, 2015, when Lithuania officially adopted the euro as its currency.

In 2013, Hanke founded the Troubled Currencies Project, a collaboration between the Johns Hopkins University and the Cato Institute, in order to track exchange-rate and inflation data in countries including Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela.

Hanke remains active in Bulgaria, as a vocal supporter of the currency board, the country's flat tax, and anti-corruption measures. He frequently contributes to the Bulgarian publications Capital, Trud and Novinite, among others. In 2013, Hanke's work on the Bulgarian currency board was praised by Bulgarian Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski, and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences awarded Hanke a doctorate honoris causa. And in 2015, Varna Free University awarded Hanke the title doctor honoris causa, in honor of his scholarship on currency boards and his reform efforts in Bulgaria. In 2018, the D. A. Tsenov Academy of Economics awarded Hanke a doctorate honoris causa in honor of Hanke's work as the father of the Bulgarian currency board.

In 2012, Hanke developed a method of monetary analysis known as state-money/bank-money analysis (SMBMA). This methodology is based on John Maynard Keynes' distinction between money produced by a central bank ("state money") and money produced via the private banking sector, through deposit creation ("bank money"), contained in the 1930 classic A Treatise on Money.

One month later, in June 1992, Estonia adopted a monetary system based on the Hanke-Jonung-Schuler proposal. Estonia thus abandoned the Soviet ruble and began issuing its own currency, linking the Estonian kroon to the German Mark at a fixed exchange rate. Following the introduction of the euro, the kroon was linked to the euro, until January 1, 2011, when Estonia officially adopted the euro as its currency.

Hanke has also written extensively on the subject of hyperinflation, which describes when a country's inflation rate exceeds 50% per month. In 2008, Hanke and Alex Kwok published a paper, which estimated that Zimbabwe's hyperinflation peaked in November 2008 at 7.96×10%. This makes Zimbabwe's hyperinflation the second-highest in history – peaking 3.5 months after the Mugabe government stopped reporting inflation statistics, and 1.5 months after the IMF's last estimate of Zimbabwe's inflation rate, with a peak inflation rate 30 million times higher than the last official rate.

Hanke has employed SMBMA as a method of analyzing the response of various countries to the 2008 financial crisis. In particular, Hanke has employed SMBMA for the United States, the United Kingdom, and various countries in the European Union to study the pro-cyclical effects of higher capital-asset ratios implemented during economic downturns. Hanke has been an outspoken critic of pro-cyclical capital requirements imposed under Basel III, Dodd–Frank, and other financial regulatory regimes. Also, he is on the advisory board of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) in London, where he regularly contributes to the OMFIF's The Bulletin and is involved in meetings regarding financial and monetary systems.

Shortly after his appointment, Hanke published a critique of the IMF currency board proposal. Warren Coats, a key member of the IMF team discussed Hanke's involvement at length in a 2007 book. In a section of the book titled "Steve Hanke" Coats recounts:

In 2001, Hanke was appointed adviser to Ecuador's Minister of Finance and Economy, to assist with the implementation of dollarization. In 2003, Hanke was awarded the honorary degree Doctor of Arts by the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, and in 2004, he was named professor asociado by the Universidad del Azuay in Cuenca, Ecuador, in honor of his reform efforts in Ecuador and scholarship on dollarization.

However, in 1999, Ecuador's currency, the sucre, collapsed, losing 75% of its value against the U.S. dollar from the start of 1999 until the first week of January 2000. Shortly thereafter, Ecuadorian President Jamil Mahuad resurrected the dollarization idea. On January 9, 2000, he announced that Ecuador would abandon the sucre and officially adopt the U.S. dollar, putting an end to Ecuador's high inflation.

Later, officials including former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating conceded that criticism of Hanke's proposal did not stem from opposition to the economics of Hanke's proposal, but rather out of concern that a stable rupiah would thwart U.S.-led efforts to oust Suharto. As Nobel laureate Merton Miller recalled in 1999, the objection to Hanke's proposal was "not that it wouldn't work but that it would, and if it worked, they would be stuck with Suharto."

In 1999, Hanke and Montenegrin economist Željko Bogetić, who was an economist at the IMF at the time, wrote Crnogorska marka, a book published in Montenegro, proposing an orthodox currency board for Montenegro, which was part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Montenegro would issue a Montenegrin "marka" to replace the Yugoslav dinar. Later that year in July 1999, Hanke was appointed state counselor – a cabinet-level position – and began advising Montenegrin President Milo Đukanović on issues including currency reform. After assessing the political and economic realities on the ground, Hanke advised Đukanović that Montenegro should abandon the faltering Yugoslav dinar and adopt a foreign currency, the German Mark, as its own. This process is known as dollarization.

In 1999, Montenegro was part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, along with Serbia. Đukanović began pursuing Hanke's dollarization proposal for both economic and political reasons. In addition to providing relief from high inflation, dollarization also promised Montenegro the ability to pursue economic – and ultimately political – independence from Serbia.

In late 1999, Montenegro introduced the German Mark as an official currency. In late 2000, the Yugoslav dinar was officially dropped, making the Deutsche Mark the sole legal tender in Montenegro.

In 1998, under Hanke's leadership, Friedberg Mercantile Group, Inc. was one of the few trading shops to predict the devaluation of the Russian ruble. Hanke predicted that the devaluation would occur after mid-year, and the ruble collapsed shortly thereafter, on August 17, 1998.

In February 1998, Indonesian President Suharto invited Hanke to serve as his economic adviser. On the day of Hanke's appointment as special counselor and a member of Indonesia's Economic and Monetary Resilience Council, the rupiah appreciated by 28% against the U.S. dollar. During his time as Suharto's adviser, Hanke had an unprecedented level of access to the Indonesian president and even played a role in the dismissal of Indonesia's Central Bank governor.

In 1998, during his annual accountability speech, Suharto announced his intention to adopt Hanke's currency board proposal. This plan was met with opposition by the governments of Germany, Japan, and Singapore, among others. Economists including Nouriel Roubini and Paul Krugman also entered the fray with criticism of Hanke's proposal. The fiercest resistance, however, came from the IMF and from U.S. President Bill Clinton – who threatened to withdraw $43 billion in aid if Indonesia adopted Hanke's proposal.

Under intense international pressure, Suharto ultimately reversed course and abandoned Hanke's "IMF Plus" proposal. On May 21, 1998, amid continued currency problems, as well as protests and reports of a brewing military coup, Suharto resigned as president of Indonesia.

In the article "Rupiah Rasputin" written in 1998 for Fortune, Paul Krugman said that Hanke had inflated his connection to former Argentine Finance Minister Domingo Cavallo and quoted the latter as saying that Hanke had only volunteered as a publicist. Krugman also argued that creating a currency board in Indonesia "was probably a bad idea right now", because it would interfere with payments for imports or debt service.

In 1997, during Bulgaria's second episode of hyperinflation, Hanke was appointed as an adviser to Bulgarian President Petar Stoyanov, and worked to bring about the establishment of Bulgaria's currency board. Inspired by the original Hanke-Schuler blueprint, members of the Bulgarian government drafted a law which converted the Bulgarian National Bank to a currency board system. Acting in his capacity as Stoyanov's adviser, Hanke continued to be deeply involved in fine-tuning and steering his idea to full adoption, throughout the drafting, legislative, and implementation process.

Bulgaria adopted the proposal and installed the currency board on July 1, 1997. The currency board linked the lev to the German Deutsche Mark, and later the euro. Upon adoption, the Bulgarian Currency Board immediately put an end to the country's 1997 hyperinflation episode. Hanke continued to serve as President Stoyanov's adviser until the end of his term in 2002.

In August 1997, upon urging from the International Monetary Fund, Indonesia adopted a floating exchange rate for its currency, the rupiah. In the ensuing months, the rupiah weakened significantly against the U.S. dollar. Inflation in Indonesia began to accelerate, sparking food riots across the country.

Following Bucaram's election, Hanke presented a dollarization proposal to members of the Ecuadorian government. But, by February 1997, Bucaram had been removed from office on insanity charges, and the dollarization idea lay dormant.

Hanke began writing his "Point of View" column for Forbes magazine in 1997, continuing to do so through 2010. Initially, the column was co-authored with Sir Alan Walters. Hanke was also a contributing editor for Forbes Asia magazine. Recently, Hanke was a columnist at Forbes where he wrote five columns a month. Now, he is a contributor at National Review. He is also a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal's Opinion pages, ZeroHedge, Gulf News, OMFIF's The Bulletin, and the International Monetary Institute bulletin at the Renmin University of China, among others.

Hanke began serving as a special adviser to the U.S. government in December 1996 and was tasked with ensuring that the central bank law resulted in a currency board system that was as orthodox as possible.

In 1995, Hanke and Johns Hopkins University history professor Louis Galambos founded the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and Study of Business Enterprise. Hanke is also a senior fellow and director of the Troubled Currencies Project at the Cato Institute, a special counselor to the Center for Financial Stability, and a member of the Charter Council of the Society for Economic Measurement.

As the convertibility system began to falter, Carlos Menem, on Hanke's advice, proposed dollarization for Argentina – first in 1995 and again in January 1999. In February 1999, Menem asked Hanke to prepare a dollarization blueprint for Argentina. This proposal was never acted upon, and the convertibility system ultimately collapsed in 2002.

Hanke was also an early proponent of currency boards, and later, dollarization in Ecuador. In 1995, Hanke and Kurt Schuler published a currency board blueprint in Spanish that was widely circulated in Ecuador. In May 1996, Hanke traveled to Ecuador to encourage then-presidential candidate Abdalá Bucaram to pursue a currency board for Ecuador. Shortly thereafter, Bucaram raised the idea of a currency board while on the campaign trail.

In 1995, during the Mexican tequila crisis, many investors were shying away from Argentine investments. Relying on his deep understanding of the convertibility system, Hanke bet against the market and had TTA fully invested in Argentine peso-denominated bonds. As a result, TTA was the world's best performing mutual fund in 1995, with a 79.25% increase.

Following Hanke and Sir Alan Walters' 1994 prediction of the Mexican peso's collapse, Argentine Finance Minister Domingo Cavallo invited Hanke to serve as his adviser. During this time, Hanke's primary role was to leverage his scholarship and experience as one of the experts who was in the middle of the currency reform debates before the adoption of the convertibility system – as well as his credibility established when he predicted the tequila crisis – to explain how the convertibility system operated at the time, and to restore confidence in Argentina and the peso's international credibility. At the time, Hanke was described by Argentine newspapers as "Cavallo's spokesman" and the "generator of confidence" in the Argentine economy.

Having witnessed the positive effects of neighboring Estonia's currency board, Lithuanian Prime Minister Adolfas Šleževičius, met with Hanke and his wife Liliane over lunch in January 1994 to discuss the possibility of a currency reform package for Lithuania. During that meeting, Šleževičius appointed Hanke a state counselor – a cabinet-level appointment – and tasked him with designing a currency board system for Lithuania.

Hanke has also worked as an expert witness in financial litigation, specializing in derivatives cases. In the past, he was a principal at Chicago Partners (now Navigant Consulting). In 1994, Hanke, his then-post-doctoral student Christopher Culp, and Nobel laureate Merton Miller waded into the debate over the collapse of Metallgesellschaft AG. Although not officially involved in the case, Hanke, Culp, and Miller made headlines when they revealed that Metallgesellschaft's oil futures hedge was sound, and that it was Deutsche Bank who was responsible for the collapse of the $1.3 billion position.

In addition, he played a central role in drafting and bringing about the inclusion of the so-called "Hanke Amendment" in the 1993 Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill. This measure, sponsored by Senators Phil Graham, Bob Dole, Connie Mack, Jesse Helms, and Steve Symms allowed U.S. contributions to the International Monetary Fund to be used for the purpose of establishing currency boards.

Over the course of his career, Hanke has written over 20 books and monographs and over 300 articles on currency boards and dollarization. Many of these were written in collaboration with Kurt Schuler. Hanke also co-authored with Sir Alan Walters the entry for "Currency Boards" in the 1992 edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance.

In 1992, Hanke, Kurt Schuler, and Lars Jonung – then a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics – released a book in both English and Estonian containing a blueprint for an Estonian currency board.

After Jonung was appointed chief economic advisor to Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, in 1992, Jonung convinced Bildt to embrace the idea of a currency board for Estonia and arrange for its presentation to the Estonian government. In May 1992, Hanke presented the currency board blueprint to members of Estonia's Constituent Assembly in Tallinn.

Later, Hanke worked closely with Menem and members of the Argentine Congress to implement a currency board, along the general lines of Hanke and Schuler's original proposal. The result was not an orthodox currency board, but rather a "convertibility system", passed in the Convertibility Law of 1991, which ended Argentina's hyperinflation episode.

Argentina's convertibility system differed in several key respects from Hanke's original proposal, however. In October 1991, the year the system was implemented, Hanke warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the convertibility system could begin to function as a central bank, and eventually collapse. This prediction came true in the late 1990s, as the Argentine convertibility system began to function like a central bank and engage in sterilization. Hanke wrote many articles showing that the convertibility system was not a currency board.

In 1991, the Ekonomski Institute Beograd published a book, in the Serbo-Croatian language, which Hanke and Schuler co-authored. The book laid out the details about what would have been a Yugoslav currency board. However, these efforts were suspended when the Yugoslav civil war broke out and Pregl resigned in June 1991. After the war broke out, Hanke continued his involvement in the Balkans, working with Deloitte & Touche's Eastern European division to establish new Deloitte offices and bring traditional financial accounting to the formerly communist country.

In 1991, Hanke began advising Albanian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy Gramoz Pashko on the possibility of establishing a currency board in Albania. The proposal was contained in Hanke and Kurt Schuler's 1991 monograph "A Currency Board Solution for the Albanian Lek", published by the International Freedom Foundation. The proposal was never acted upon.

Influenced by the 1991 Hanke-Schuler book proposing a currency board for Yugoslavia, the 1995 Dayton Agreement required Bosnia and Herzegovina to employ a currency board for at least six years. In the aftermath of the Yugoslav civil war, local officials and an IMF team set about to create a central bank for Bosnia and Herzegovina based on the principles of a currency board.

In collaboration with his then-post-doctoral student, Kurt Schuler, Hanke developed a blueprint for a currency board reform package, which he proposed in a number of countries throughout the 1990s, including Albania, Argentina, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ecuador, Estonia, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Montenegro, Russia, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia.

In January 1990, Hanke was appointed the personal economic adviser to Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Zivko Pregl. Although Pregl was at one point a leader of the Communist League of Yugoslavia, he sought Hanke's counsel on ways to liberalize Yugoslavia's socialist economy. During this time, Hanke proposed a number of free-market reforms, including the privatization of Yugoslavia's pension system, as well as a currency board system to address the failing Yugoslav dinar.

In 1990, Hanke anticipated Bulgaria's 1991 hyperinflation episode and began designing a currency board system for Bulgaria. He incorporated this proposal into a monograph co-authored with Kurt Schuler. The monograph, "Teeth for the Bulgarian Lev: A Currency Board Solution" was published in 1991.

Hanke continued his work on a Bulgarian currency board, periodically visiting Sofia throughout the early 1990s. In late 1996, Hanke and Schuler's currency reform handbook Currency Boards for Developing Countries gained popularity when a pirated Bulgarian-language version of the book became a best-seller in Sofia.

In the early 1990s, George Selgin, Joseph Sinkey Jr., and Kurt Schuler began working with Elena Leontjeva of the Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI) on a reform proposal for Lithuania's central bank. Later, Hanke also began collaborating with the LFMI during regular visits to Vilnius.

Hanke has been trading commodities and currencies for over 60 years. He has also trained a number of Johns Hopkins students who have gone on to successful careers in finance. He is chairman emeritus of the Friedberg Mercantile Group, Inc. in Toronto. During the 1990s, he served as president of Toronto Trust Argentina (TTA) in Buenos Aires. It was the world best performing mutual fund in 1995.

In 1989, Hanke met Argentine President Carlos Menem, who connected Hanke and his wife, Liliane, with the libertarian faction in the Argentine Congress led by Alvaro Alsogaray, for the purpose of developing a currency reform that would end Argentina's inflation problems. Hanke was an early proponent of a currency board system for Argentina, which he outlined in a 1991 book. The book, ¿Banco Central O Caja de Conversión? was co-authored by Kurt Schuler and included a preface by Argentine Congressman José María Ibarbia, who was a member of the Alsogaray faction.

During the 1989 to 1991 period, Hanke worked closely with Congressman José María Ibarbia and his colleagues (the so-called Alsogaray faction) in the Argentine Congress to develop a blueprint for a currency board system. That blueprint was published in Buenos Aires and contains a preface written by José María Ibarbia.

Hanke has authored numerous articles on the subject of privatization, including the entry for "Privatization" in the 1987 edition of The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics.

Hanke has taken several other notable successful trading positions during his career. For example, in late 1985, he was among the first to correctly predict that oil would fall below $10 per barrel, and in 1993, he joined a successful speculative attack on the French franc, which illicited an article in Paris Match, "Scenario-fiction Pour Une Journée De Cocagne: Hunt, Hanke, Goldsmith Tsutsumi Et Les Autres...".

In 1984, Hanke was appointed a senior adviser to the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, where he advised Senators Steve Symms and Paul Laxalt on privatization.

After Hong Kong reinstated its currency board in 1983, Hanke began to collaborate with his fellow Johns Hopkins professor, and Margaret Thatcher's personal economic adviser, Sir Alan Walters, on the subject of currency boards. A currency board is a monetary authority that issues a local currency that is fully backed by a foreign reserve currency, and which is freely convertible with the foreign reserve currency at a fixed exchange rate. Walters was a key advocate of the reestablishment of Hong Kong's currency board.

Hanke's work to privatize public lands put him at odds with Secretary of the Interior James Watt and members of the Sagebrush Rebellion, who sought to transfer federal public lands to state control, rather than to private ownership. In 1982, Hanke left the CEA, joining a number of influential Reagan administration supply-siders, including Martin Anderson, Norman B. Ture, and Paul Craig Roberts.

Hanke is known for his work as a currency reformer in emerging-market countries such as Albania, Argentina, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ecuador, Estonia, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Montenegro, Russia, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia. He was a senior economist with President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers from 1981 to 1982, and has served as an adviser to heads of state in countries throughout Asia, South America, Europe, and the Middle East. He is also known for his work on currency boards, dollarization, hyperinflation, water pricing and demand, benefit-cost analysis, privatization, and other topics in applied economics.

In 1981, Hanke was appointed a senior economist with the president's Council of Economic Advisers, where his responsibilities included the Reagan White House's water portfolio. While at the CEA, Hanke led a team that re-wrote the federal government's Principles and Guidelines for Water and Land Related Resources Implementation Studies, to include more rigorous benefit-cost analysis requirements.

Hanke's views on monetary policy are influenced by his experience as a currency and commodities trader, as well as by the economics of Milton Friedman, Robert Mundell, and Friedrich Hayek. Hanke is a proponent of Divisia monetary aggregates, originated by William A. Barnett of the University of Kansas and the Center for Financial Stability. Barnett's derivation uses the Divisia quantity index formula of  Francois Divisia with the monetary-assets user-cost-price formula derived by Barnett (1980). Hanke also favors broad monetary aggregates as articulated by economists, including Tim Congdon. Hanke argues that changes in nominal national income are a function of changes in broad money aggregates.

Hanke has produced eight books and numerous articles and proposals dealing with the privatization of public-sector resources. In 1972, he was a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya, where he worked with anthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey on the economics of big game cropping and hunting, as well as the privatization of big game reserves to combat poaching. Hanke also worked with Barney Dowdle of the University of Washington and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians of Lincoln County, Oregon, on a proposal to privatize portions of their reservation, as a means of improving economic opportunity on Native American reservations.

Hanke began advising political leaders on economic issues in the late 1970s, when he served as a member of the Governor's Council of Economic Advisers for the State of Maryland, along with Carl Christ and Clopper Almon. After stints at the president's Council of Economic Advisers, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, and the president's Task Force on Project Economic Justice during the Reagan administration, Hanke began advising heads of state in developing countries on a pro-bono basis.

In 1969, Hanke began his academic career as a water resource economist in the Johns Hopkins Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering (now the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering), a department founded by famed sanitary engineer Abel Wolman. At the time, the department was known as the premier water resource engineering department in the country, and was home to world-renowned sanitary engineer John C. Geyer, with whom Hanke would frequently collaborate.

Hanke's first academic appointment was at the Colorado School of Mines in 1966, when he was 24. During this time, Hanke developed and taught courses in mineral and petroleum economics, while completing his Ph.D. dissertation on the impact of meter installation on municipal water demand.

Steve Hanke was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1942 and grew up in Atlantic, Iowa, where he attended Atlantic High School. He then attended the University of Colorado Boulder, where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. Hanke earned a B.S. in business administration (1964) and a Ph.D. in economics (1969) from the University of Colorado.

Although the English term "reprivatisation" first appeared in The Economist magazine in the 1930s, and subsequently in various academic journals, Hanke and his wife, Liliane, are often credited with popularizing the term "privatization" – derived from the French term "privatise" – in the American economic lexicon during the 1980s, as well as for bringing about its inclusion in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

Hanke employs a methodology, based on the principle of purchasing power parity, which allows him to accurately estimate inflation in countries with very high inflation rates. Using this methodology, Hanke and his collaborators discovered several cases of hyperinflation that had previously gone unreported in the academic literature and popular press. These include the 1923 hyperinflation episode in the Free City of Danzig, and more recently, suspected cases in North Korea (2011), and Iran (2012). In 2012, Hanke and Nicholas Krus documented 56 cases of hyperinflation that have occurred in history, in "World Hyperinflations", a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Major Events in Economic History. Since then, Hanke has documented two additional cases of hyperinflation: One occurred in Venezuela in 2016, and the other occurred in Zimbabwe in 2017.