However, this tells us only what people who are confident that inflation will be moderate think inflation will be, because if you are worried about immoderate levels of inflation, you do not diversify into long term Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, you diversify into gold, silver, guns, ammunition, rice and beans, which is roughly what the Chinese are doing, except that they are also diversifying into copper and iron, and private Chinese are not allowed to diversify into guns and ammo.

This is kind of cryptic although probably right. If you thought that there was likely to be high inflation and nothing else then diversifying into TIPS would be a fine plan. TIPS pay inflation rate + real return, where real return is fixed in advance, and so guarantee against capital loss via inflation. The reason buying TIPS is a loony strategy if you expect hyperinflation is that the conditional probability of a bunch of other bad stuff (depression, civil unrest, political instability, trade break-downs, etc) is so high conditional on US hyperinflation.

It is these other things which TIPS do not hedge against but which rice, beans, and guns do. Moving to Switzerland (or obtaining or maintaining the ability rapidly to do so) would probably be a better hedge, however.

If lots of the big money people come to expect hyperinflation, we should see interest rates on both TIPS and regular treasury securities rising a lot, with the TIPS rising only somewhat less.