100,000,000 billion Hungarian pengő: the world’s highest denomination ever
Change language:
How much could you buy for one hundred million billion Hungarian pengő? The short answer to the question: How much exactly could you buy for one hundred million billion pengő is USD 279. At least, this is how much you can purchase the banknote of that denomination as listed at press time on eBay. But back in the 1940s, it was a bit more complicated.
You could say that 20th-century Hungary wasn’t constant in its feelings toward money. Initially, after the country appeared from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it used its own korona restamped at par with its former counterpart. Since 1946, it has been using the forint. What was in between was the pengő, 3seaseurope.com wrote.
The life span of the pengő was relatively short: from 1927 to 1946. But boy, did it follow a wild path, starting from modest sums and ending with a denomination at a rate of 1 forint to four hundred octillion pengő. Yes, you read that correctly. That’s a four followed by twenty-nine zeros.
The obligation to change the currency from the former Austro-Hungarian currency was included in the Treaty of Saint-Germain, a peace treaty between the German-Austria Republic and its allied opponents. The economy in Hungary was terrible and soon led the way to massive inflation of the Hungarian korona. But the League of Nations, the United Nations of the time, offered some help.
