The warning from Paul Singer’s hedge fund that the world is “on the road to ‘hyperinflation’” is no doubt going to be met with a certain amount of ridicule. That’s what happened when in 2010 Mr. Singer organized an open letter, signed by distinguished economists, investors, and journalists and published in the Wall Street Journal, warning of an inflation ahead.* It was met with derision by the ilk of, say, Paul Krugman and other Keynesians.

The thing to remember is that the inflation did erupt, if not, at first, in the Consumer Price Index but initially in various assets ($200 million apartments at New York, a heretofore unknown Da Vinci going for $450 million and the like) and a plunge in the gold value of the dollar and eventually — bingo — the inflation in consumer and wholesale prices we’re seeing today. So we tend to think that Mr. Singer’s warning is newsworthy.

The scoop was brought in by the London Financial Times, which reported Friday morning that Mr. Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management, issued a report warning that the world is “on the path to hyperinflation” that could lead to “global societal collapse and civil or international strife.” Mr. Singer’s fund, the FT reports,  noted that “while such an outcome is not certain, this is currently the direction” in which “the world was headed.”

Elliott Management takes a long view, telling investors who lived through such debacles as “the 1970s bear market and oil price shock, the 1987 market crash, the dotcom bust or the 2008 financial crisis” that they “should not assume they have ‘seen everything.’” Even though markets have tumbled this year, with the S&P 500 down 20 percent from the start of 2022, Mr. Singer contends “markets had not fallen far enough” for today’s risks. 

It’s striking that Mr. Singer pins “much of the blame” for the current mess “on central bank policymakers,” the FT reports. It’s the dissembling that riles him: the central bankers “had been ‘dishonest’ about the causes of high inflation,” the FT writes, “by blaming it on supply chain bottlenecks” after Covid, and not the “ultra-loose monetary policy put in place at the height of the coronavirus crisis.” This led us back to his 2010 letter.

At the time, the Federal Reserve under Chairman Ben Bernanke was embarking on the first steps of its experimental Quantitative Easing plan, with $600 billion in asset purchases designed to spark growth while holding interest rates down. Today, the Fed has ended up with some $8.7 trillion on its balance sheet, and it’s not clear how, or even if, it will be able to get back to normal — by which we mean the pre-Bernanke level of less than $1 trillion.

The letter Mr. Singer organized in 2010 argued that Mr. Bernanke’s “so-called ‘quantitative easing’” should be “reconsidered and discontinued” because the “planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation.” Yet Mr. Bernanke said “this fear of inflation, I think is way overstated.” Mr. Krugman in 2014 mocked the warning, noting that “reality” had “declined to cooperate.”

It’s no coincidence, as we see it, that Mr. Singer is now singling out central bankers for being “dishonest” when it comes to price stability. After all, in 2010, Mr. Bernanke was asked to respond to critics like Mr. Singer by CBS News: “Can you act quickly enough to prevent inflation from getting out of control?” The Fed chief replied: “We could raise interest rates in 15 minutes if we have to.” He claimed a degree of confidence of “One hundred percent.”

The effort afoot now to end “the era of cheap money,” as the FT puts it, spooks Mr. Singer. He sees so many “frightening and seriously negative possibilities” that the likely outcome is “a seriously adverse unwind of the everything bubble.” It can’t be lost on Mr. Singer — or so we guess — that Mr. Bernanke, the culprit in the inflation now choking the world, will be honored with the Nobel in economics. Call it a lagging indicator.

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* The two-dozen signers included two former owners of the Sun, Roger Hertog and Mr. Singer, and journalist and historian Amity Shlaes, who is married to the editor of the Sun.