Nothing in the world is more taken for granted than money -- our only concern is whether we have enough of it, not whether it will work at all. Nobody puts in ten hours of overtime and spends the whole time praying that by payday the grocery store will still accept the currency ... despite the fact that this exact situation has played out again and again. Money is a fragile thing, vulnerable to a whole lot of societal factors that you have no control over whatsoever. Which is why sometimes things just go completely insane ...

5 Hungary's 13,600,000,000,000,000 Percent Inflation

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So you head down to the grocery store to get a box of Pop-Tarts for lunch, because you live alone and haven't flipped the page on your Dragonriders of Pern calendar in three months. When you get to the store, you realize you've left your wallet at home, so you have to put the Pop-Tarts back on the shelf and drive to your apartment to get it. By the time you make it back to buy your lunch, you see that the Pop-Tarts are twice as expensive as they were when you first got to the store an hour ago. At lunchtime the next day, they're five times as expensive. A month later, they cost more than your car.

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"Sorry, ma'am, no cards. We only take sexual favors."

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What? When Did This Happen?

The Hungarian economy experienced possibly the most catastrophic hyperinflation in history between 1945 and 1946, with inflation topping out at roughly 200 percent per day and prices doubling about every 15 hours.

How the hell did this happen? After being left in economic shambles after losing World War I, Hungary experienced a period of nasty inflation until the League of Nations bailed them out with a loan. The Hungarian korona was replaced by the gold-backed pengo, which for a time was the most stable currency in the region, despite sounding no less made up. However, the Great Depression punched Hungary's agriculture industry in the Hungonads, and this, combined with their willingness to print as much pengo as they damn well felt like, started the inflation train rolling. Eventually it would literally take a truckload of bills to buy a loaf of bread.

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She's lighting that cigarette with a billion pengo note.

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Naturally, the government's response was to print even more money in larger and larger denominations, finally culminating with the 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 pengo note (imagine a hundred quintillion dollar bill).

Only the introduction of a new currency backed by gold, foreign currencies and foreign securities -- the forint -- broke the free fall. After that, there was only one thing left to do with the mountains of surplus pengo: