- Who
- 1 Százmillió B.-Pengö
- What
- 100 quintillion US dollar(s)
- Where
- Hungary ()
- When
The highest denomination banknote ever issued was the Hungarian million billion pengö note (100 quintillion; 1 with 20 zeros), which was printed on 3 June 1946 and withdrawn on 31 July. It was printed during the worst case of hyperinflation ever recorded. Later that year, Hungary remonetized and began to issue a new currency called the forint, which could be exchanged at a rate of one for 400 octillion pengö (4 with 29 zeros).
The Hungarian economy was left devastated at the end of World War II; an estimated 40 percent of the nation's assets had been destroyed or removed (either by Nazi Germany or by the Soviet Red Army that drove them out) and it had lost a large portion of its working-age population to either the holocaust, battlefield losses or prisoner-of-war camps in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, as it was one of the Axis powers allied with Nazi Germany, it received little aid and was ordered to pay $300 million in reparations. It was also required to pay for the living costs of the 700,000-strong Soviet occupying force.
While these circumstances led to the start of this period of hyperinflation, it became as extreme as it did because the postwar coalition government gambled on being able to use it as an economic tool. Rather than raising interest rates and reducing money supply – two policies that would have dampened the effect, but at the cost of damaging the economy in the long term – the government tried to harness the inflation as a way of escaping its unsustainable debt obligations.
The result was that between July 1945 and August 1946, the number of Pengö needed to achieve the same purchasing power increased by 3 x 10^25, meaning that something that cost 1 pengö in June 1945 would have cost 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pengö (30 septillion pengö) by July 1946.
