Hyperinflation Museum

Peru's Inti Hyperinflation: Three Currencies in Six Years

In August 1990 Lima consumer prices rose 396.98 percent in a single month (Martinelli and Vega, Banco Central de Reserva del Perú Working Paper DT 2018-007), the peak of a collapse that pushed Peru through three currency systems between February 1985 and July 1991. One 1991 nuevo sol replaced 1,000,000 intis, and one inti had already replaced 1,000 soles de oro, which makes a single 1991 sol the arithmetic equal of 1,000,000,000 pre-1985 soles de oro.

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Last updated: July 2026

Why did Peru use three currencies in six years?

Because each currency was overtaken by the inflation it was created to escape. The sol de oro was replaced by the inti on 1 February 1985 under Ley 24064 at a rate of 1,000 soles de oro to 1 inti. The inti was replaced by the nuevo sol on 1 July 1991 at 1,000,000 intis to 1 nuevo sol. Chained together, the two redenominations lopped nine zeros off Peru's money in six years and five months.

Peru did not arrive at 1985 in good health. Annual inflation ran at 163.4 percent in 1985, 77.9 percent in 1986 and 85.9 percent in 1987 before the real break (Martinelli and Vega, BCRP Working Paper DT 2018-007, Table B-1, drawing on the Lima consumer price index collected by INEI). The inti was introduced as a clean slate. Its name comes from Inti, the Inca sun deity, and the notes were a national statement, carrying Ramón Castilla, Túpac Amaru II, Miguel Grau and the poet César Vallejo.

The clean slate lasted about three years. What broke it, in the reading of Martinelli and Vega, was fiscal dominance of monetary policy. When a government cannot borrow, it prints, and the printing is a tax. The bind tightened from both ends: as inflation accelerated, the real value of tax receipts collected with a lag collapsed, an effect economists call the Olivera-Tanzi mechanism. Peruvian tax revenue fell from roughly 12.20 percent of GDP in 1986 to 6.5 percent in 1989 (Martinelli and Vega, BCRP Working Paper DT 2018-007). Every month of higher inflation shrank the tax base that would have made the printing unnecessary.

That final line is the one worth sitting with. The paper in a Peruvian drawer never changed. The unit of account underneath it was rebuilt twice in six years. Anyone building a country set through Peru banknotes is really assembling three separate monetary regimes that happen to share a flag.

Peru had two hyperinflations, not one

This is the detail most summaries get wrong. Under the standard Cagan test, hyperinflation begins when monthly inflation exceeds 50 percent and ends when it stays below 50 percent for at least a year. By that measure Peru had two distinct episodes: September 1988, when monthly inflation hit 114.12 percent, and July to August 1990, when it hit 396.98 percent. The twenty-one months in between never once crossed the threshold, running between 23.05 percent and 48.64 percent (Martinelli and Vega, BCRP Working Paper DT 2018-007).

The September 1988 spike carries a Peruvian nickname, "el Salinazo" (Martinelli and Vega, BCRP Working Paper DT 2018-007). It followed a large official correction of administered prices meant to close the gap between controlled prices and reality, and the market read it as one more adjustment in a series that would keep coming. Prices absorbed the shock and kept climbing. The Hanke-Krus World Hyperinflation Table (Cato Institute) logs that month at 114 percent, an equivalent daily rate of 2.57 percent, with prices doubling every 27.7 days.

The August 1990 spike, "el Fujishock", was structurally the same kind of announcement and produced a completely different reaction. Monthly inflation reached 396.98 percent, a daily rate of 5.49 percent, with prices doubling every 13.1 days (Hanke-Krus World Hyperinflation Table, Cato Institute). Then it stopped. September 1990 came in at 13.77 percent, October at 9.62 percent, November at 5.93 percent. Martinelli and Vega note that the Fujishock was actually followed by several weeks of outright deflation, which the monthly series does not capture because the fall was over before September ended. Their reading is that economic agents correctly anticipated a change of regime in 1990 and, equally correctly, expected no such change in 1988.

Annually, the damage reads 667.0 percent in 1988, 3,398.6 percent in 1989 and 7,481.7 percent in 1990, before falling to 409.5 percent in 1991 and 73.5 percent in 1992 (Martinelli and Vega, BCRP Working Paper DT 2018-007, Table B-1). Peru would not see annual inflation back near 10 percent for five years after the stabilization began.

How large did inti banknotes get?

The inti series topped out at 5,000,000 intis, carrying the naturalist Antonio Raimondi. The whole climb happened astonishingly fast. On 28 June 1988 the Banco Central de Reserva del Perú issued the 5,000, 10,000 and 50,000 inti notes on a single day, and the largest note in circulation before that morning had been 1,000 intis.

That single day is the tell. Central banks do not release three denominations at once unless the existing ceiling has already failed. The 100,000 inti followed on 21 November 1988, weeks after the Salinazo. The 500,000, 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 all belong to the currency's last stretch: the 1,000,000 carries a printing date of 5 January 1990 and the 5,000,000 one of 16 January 1991 (Numista), and the 5,000,000 was still the ceiling when the inti was retired on 1 July 1991.

Several inti denominations exist in more than one dated printing, and those printings carry adjacent catalogue numbers rather than a single shared one. That is why most of the Pick column above is deliberately empty. We list a catalogue number only where we can tie it to a specific dated variety, and we would rather leave a cell blank than publish a number a collector might rely on. If you are new to how these references work, our guide to Pick numbers explains the lettered suffix system that separates one printing from the next.

By world standards the inti's ceiling was high but not record breaking. The 5,000,000 inti note has six zeros; Zimbabwe's 2008 series reached fourteen and the Hungarian pengő reached twenty, laid out on our page on the highest denomination banknote ever issued. What is striking about Peru is the compression. The 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 inti notes measure only 140 mm by 65 mm (Numista), the same modest format as the small change of the series. Peru never let its notes grow. It only let the numbers grow.

What was the Fujishock of August 1990?

The Fujishock was the stabilization package announced on national television on the evening of 8 August 1990 by Economy Minister Juan Carlos Hurtado Miller, eleven days after Alberto Fujimori took office. It devalued the exchange rate in one step, unified Peru's multiple official exchange rates, and raised regulated utility prices by extraordinary margins: gasoline by 3,040 percent, electricity by 5,270 percent and water by 1,318 percent (Velarde and Rodríguez 1992b, reproduced in Martinelli and Vega, BCRP Working Paper DT 2018-007, Table 2).

Hurtado Miller closed the broadcast with four words that entered the Peruvian language: "Que Dios nos ayude." May God help us. Martinelli and Vega describe the line as capturing the genuine uncertainty about whether the program would work. Peruvians woke up the next morning to prices they could not absorb.

Wages were adjusted, though nowhere near proportionally. The package included a one time 100 percent bonus and a 400 percent increase in the minimum wage, against a 3,040 percent increase in the regulated price of gasoline (Velarde and Rodríguez 1992b, reproduced in Martinelli and Vega, BCRP Working Paper DT 2018-007, Table 2). Set those two numbers beside each other and you have the human arithmetic of a stabilization: the fastest way to stop the printing press is to stop asking it for money, and the cost of stopping lands immediately on households while the benefit arrives months later.

The monetary architecture mattered more than the price adjustments. The government committed to taking no financing at all from the central bank, with a single exception, an emergency loan to cover the initial salary increases, which was repaid within thirty days exactly as promised. The marginal reserve requirement on banks was cut from 80 percent to 64 percent, interest rates were freed, and base money growth became the anchor of policy through a published annual monetary program. The Central Bank Organic Law of 1993 later wrote the prohibition on government financing into statute (Martinelli and Vega, BCRP Working Paper DT 2018-007).

Compare that with hyperinflations that took several attempts to end. Germany needed the Rentenmark and a full institutional reset, described on our page on the German hyperinflation of 1923, and Yugoslavia went through several failed dinar reforms before the 1994 super dinar, covered in Yugoslavia's dinar collapse. Peru's worked on the first try.

What was the inti millón?

The inti millón (I/m.) was a unit of account, not a banknote. From 1 January 1991 to 30 June 1991, prices, contracts and accounts could be quoted in inti millones, where 1 inti millón equalled 1,000,000 intis and therefore exactly 1 nuevo sol. No inti millón note was ever issued. It was a bridge, designed so that Peru could start thinking in new sol terms six months before the new sol existed.

This is frequently misunderstood. Collectors occasionally search for an "inti millón banknote" and there is none to find. What circulated in those six months were ordinary inti notes, including the 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 denominations, while shop signs and ledgers quietly retrained the public to divide by a million.

On 1 July 1991 the nuevo sol became Peru's currency at 1,000,000 intis to 1. Inti notes were withdrawn and demonetized; the catalogue database Numista records 5 April 1992 as the demonetization date for the 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 notes. They ceased to circulate as money and began a second life as documents, which is where the collector market picks up the story.

How does Peru rank against the world's worst hyperinflations?

Peru holds two places in the Hanke-Krus World Hyperinflation Table (Cato Institute), 12th for the July to August 1990 episode and 37th for September 1988, out of 56 documented episodes worldwide. That double entry is unusual. Most countries in the table appear once.

The final column is the one specialists watch and almost nobody reproduces. Hanke and Krus do not measure every episode with the same instrument. Peru's figures come from a consumer price index, Germany's from a wholesale index, and Zimbabwe's from an implied exchange rate because official Zimbabwean price statistics had stopped being published. That is why direct rank comparisons deserve care, and it is one reason we set the episodes out side by side on every hyperinflation ranked rather than presenting a single tidy league table. If you want the two extremes of the record, see Hungary 1946 at the top and Zimbabwe 2008 just behind it.

What should collectors look for in inti banknotes?

Condition first, then completeness. Inti notes circulated hard during a period when Peruvians carried thick bricks of paper for ordinary purchases, so genuinely crisp uncirculated examples of the mid-range denominations are scarcer than the printed quantities suggest. The top three denominations, 500,000, 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 intis, had the shortest working lives and survive more often in high grade.

A complete twelve note inti run from 10 to 5,000,000 is one of the most satisfying single country hyperinflation sets a collector can assemble, because it fits in one album page and tells the entire arc without commentary. Add a sol de oro note from before 1985 and an early nuevo sol note from after 1991 and you have the whole three currency sequence in fourteen pieces. That is a display that explains itself to anyone who picks it up, which is exactly what the best hyperinflation banknotes do.

On grading, the inti series rewards attention. These notes show handling immediately at the corners and along the centre fold. Our banknote grading guide covers what separates an About Uncirculated note from a true Gem, and how to store banknotes covers the sleeve and humidity choices that keep a set stable over decades. Notes that spent thirty years in coastal humidity often show foxing that no amount of pressing will remove.

One caution that applies across the hyperinflation field: novelty reproductions of dramatic high denomination notes circulate widely, usually printed on modern paper without intaglio relief and often without the correct watermark. Learn the feel of a genuine intaglio surface and check the watermark against a light before buying anywhere. Our page on how to spot counterfeit banknotes walks through the specific checks. Prices for genuine inti notes vary with grade and available inventory, so browse the current selection in hyperinflation sets or the hyperinflation sets category for what is in stock today.

What else do people ask about Peru's inti hyperinflation?

Planet Banknote is a family-owned dealership in Sarasota, Florida, founded in 2021. Every note is sourced direct from mints, central banks, and authorized distributors, inspected through our Planet Banknote Verified process, and ships with a free Certificate of Authenticity. US orders ship free via USPS Priority, and every order includes a free bonus gift.

Keep reading: our full country overview at Peru banknotes covers the sol de oro and nuevo sol issues either side of the inti, every hyperinflation ranked places Peru's two episodes in the global record, and the highest denomination banknote ever issued shows what happens when a central bank stops counting zeros. When you are ready to hold one, start with hyperinflation sets or browse graded banknotes.