Hyperinflation

So the printing presses ran, and once they began to run, they were hard to stop. The price increases began to be dizzying. Menus in cafes could not be revised quickly enough. A student at Freiburg University ordered a cup of coffee at a café. The price on the menu was 5,000 marks. He had two cups. When the bill came, it was for 14,000 marks.

“If you want to save money,” he was told, “and you want two cups of coffee, you should order them both at the same time.”

The presses of the Reichsbank could not keep up, though they ran through the night. Individual cities and states began to issue their own money. A factory worker described payday, which was every day at 11 a.m.: “At eleven o’clock in the morning a siren sounded and everybody gathered in the factory forecourt where a five-ton lorry was drawn up loaded brimful with paper money. The chief cashier and his assistants climbed up on top. They read out names and just threw out bundles of notes. As soon as you caught one you made a dash for the nearest shop and bought just anything that was going.”

– from Paper Money, page 67, by Adam Smith (pen name of George J. W. Goodman), 1981

Thank God I wasn’t a payroll manager in 1920s Weimar Germany! Although I probably would have a slight advantage in such an occupation, i.e., I’d be sure to get my bundle of notes off to get some hard goods before anyone else. Although, come to think of it, that’d probably get me strung up from the nearest tree. I thereby reaffirm my first statement three sentences back.