The great inflation of the 1500s is echoing eerily today

In the days of Henry VIII, England seemed to be falling apart. There had never been so many beggars, witnesses reported, many of whom would cut your throat given half a chance. Everyone suspected, rightly it turns out, that the currency was being debased. Morals were as degraded as the coinage. At one infamous funeral in Kent midway through Henry’s reign, an observer reported that “the burial was turned to boozing and belly-cheer”, with an orgy involving “seven score persons of men, every one of them having his woman”. The feeling that something was not quite right was shared across Europe, which by the 1590s was consumed by financial crisis, social unrest and war.