A flood of American silver quietly tripled European prices in a century

After Spain began shipping vast quantities of silver from mines like Potosí in the 1500s, prices across much of Europe rose roughly two to three-fold over the following century, one of the first large-scale demonstrations that expanding the money supply drives inflation, well before anyone had a formal monetary theory to explain it.

— Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 — Harvard University Press, 1934