Hungarian pengo 1946. After the war, Hungary suffered a extreme period of hyperinflation. Such was it's severity that their incumbent pengo of that time literallh became worthless. The highest denomination they ever issued was the Egymillard B pengo which was a thousand million billion (hence the B). However these quickly became pattern as they did not end up in circulation. The largest in circulation was their Szamilliard B pengo which was a hundred million billion pengo. A point to note is that the European Billion is actually a million million instead of a thousand million as in the American equivalent. Thousand million billion pengo. This is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Hundred million billion pengo. This is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Hyperinflation gets to the point where printing ever larger denominations becomes pointless. But it does prove a point, that all paper money eventually returns to it's real value - worthless.
Now, here's the interesting thing about items like this. Explain to a non-collector the "exchange" value for one of these as a monetary item, and then what you paid for it and watch them look at you in disbelief.
I had a Zimbabwean friend who lived through that period. He was telling me that literally you could sit at a bar for a glass of bear and you could watch the price literally shoot up many times the original before you could finish it..
But to be fair , that is a one sided argument, because the citizens also had all physical goods of value claimed by the government . The farm lands, bullion, animals, goods, mines, etc, disappeared from people's hands, so they had no real value either to the holders. Corruption was reported at over 90% by several agencies, so it is more a case of almost all monetary materials becoming useless. If all you had was Zimbabwean currency, true you couldn't afford a beer. If you had gold or silver or a USD, you could ...at least until someone with an AK-47 took it from you, and then you couldn't either.
