A closer look
By 1993, inflation in Brazil was hitting 80% per month, and every grocery store in the country had clerks sprinting down the aisles just to update price tags daily. To fix it, economists invented the URV (Unidade Real de Valor), a completely fake, non-existent currency. Wages, taxes, and prices were secretly indexed to this stable phantom money, while people still paid in the hyper-inflating cruzeiro. Once citizens psychologically trusted the stability of the fake URV, the government simply printed physical notes, called it the Real, and magically cured the inflation crisis.
