A number of websites claim that during the hyperinflation that took place in Germany after WWI, workers were paid multiple times per day with wheelbarrows full of cash:
Some sites also say that women had to take wheelbarrows full of cash with them when they went grocery shopping.
Are these stories accurate? It sounds like a myth to me, as I can’t imagine how a government could produce that much currency that quickly. Also, if the government was attempting to devalue the currency, why print millions of tons of small-denomination bills when they could print far fewer large-denomination bills?
I remember seeing a picture in a history textbook at school depicting German schoolkids building a fort/house in their front room using bound wads of cash as bricks. The walls probably stood about 5 foot tall and maybe 6 foot long so there would be serious quantities of notes being used. Safe to say then that the currency was as near worthless as possible.
A limiting factor to using large denominations instead of large numbers of small denominations may have been the speed of the inflation - in October 1923 the value of the currency dropped by a factor of 100 within two weeks. It takes time to design, approve and engrave the plates for new denominations.
BTW the government did not aim at devaluation, rather it was an effect of financing government expenditure (notably the support of striking workers in the French-occupied Ruhr industrial area) by using the printing press.
Don’t know about wheelbarrows, but my aunt’s mother (known to me as Grandma B_____) once told me about how she’d been a millionaire as a small girl after selling some trivial item at a marketplace. She didn’t say what sort of volume the money took up, and it’s no longer possible to ask her without the aid of a medium.
Someone acquired a large amount of the worthless Marks after the currency was revalued and a Cereal maker gave them away as prizes for sending in labels from their product’s box.
It was a radio program, maybe Jack Armstron, The All American Boy. I sent away and as I recall got about 1 million marks back.
I think the wheelbarrow pictures might have been posed to illustrate the severity of the inflation. However it seems to be true that as soon as they were paid, Germans rushed to the store to buy things before the prices went up, again.
There is a picture of a woman using German bank notes for heating here and also some interesting information here, but I could not find any pictures of people bringing money in wheelbarrows. This probably didn’t happen, because the German banks were constantly printing new higher denomination banknotes (or frantically adding zeros to old ones). Like the Wikipedia link says, the highest denomination banknote issued in Germany was for 100 Trillion Reichsmarks. The bill for the printing run came to almost 33 quintillion Reichmarks! :eek:
I have sitting in front of me two 10,000 DM notes. One is Serial # A*3828377. The other is Serial # K*5627508.
They both have printed on them, " Berlin, den 19, Januar 1922 " ( Amongst lots of other German text, none of which I can read… )
My father was born in Germany in 1929. He was the first in 5 generations not to become a butcher. That was the family business. I grew up hearing such stories regarding the cash needed to purchase everyday items, and have no reason at all to think they were lies or “urban legends”. A wheelbarrowful of 10,000 DM notes bought fresh bread at the baker in town. One loaf. One…loaf.
The notes I have were a present given as a part of the Afikomen payement, a traditional part of the Passover Seder service. My uncle had a pile of them in his office downstairs, each of the 4 boys were given a few notes. They are a rather powerful connection to what my family was, before it was torn asunder.
The notes are fairly large, much larger than US notes. They measure 21 cm wide by 12 cm high. They do have several tones of ink- and both have watermarks that only show when held up to light. The backs are different, interestingly enough. The fronts are identical.
I was told by the grandparents that the DM notes were routinely sewn into winter coats for extra insulation.
My high school European history teacher was a first generation American whose father was a medium level German bureaucrat during Weimar and Nazi times. He told us stories, relayed from his father, of factory workers getting paid several times a day, having their wives meet them at work, and instantly spending the money on something tangible. That’s how fast inflation was going–you didn’t even wait for the end of the day to rid yourself of paper money. Whether anyone actually carried around money in wheelbarrows, who know, but as an image symbolic of rapid inflation and worthless currency, its pretty spot-on.
I’ve seen still pictures and film clips of wheelbarrows actually being used for that purpose. Usually it’s intended to illustrate the chaos into which postwar Germany was sinking, giving extreme politcs of both the right and left considerable resonance among the population. As things turned out, of course, the rightists won.
This may be referencing a Hungarian political cartoon of the period. The cartoon shows a man leaving a wheelbarrow of enough pengos to buy a loaf of bread by the curb, confident no one will steal the worthless money. He returns to find the pengos in the gutter, and the wheelbarrow stolen.
I had some unused German stamps at one time w hich had been overprinted with much higer values.
Current valuations couldn’t keep up with the skyrocketing inflation rate(s). Even on postage.
Since this does seem to be true, does anyone know if they switched to a barter system for most things? It seems silly to use cash when you could probably swap household goods for more than the money was worth.
But what did the shop owner do when he sold,say, 20 loaves of bread? Where would he physically put 20 wheel-barrow loads of paper? And if during the day he also sold 50 bottles of milk and 50 sausages, thats 120 barrow-loads. Seems illogical (and physically impossible. Could it be that the photos of people carrying wheel-barrows full of money were taken , not of people going shopping, but of people dumping useless bills (smaller denominations)?
Many years ago, during my first trip to Bolivia, the group I was in exchanged our US dollars for the local currency (whose name escapes me). We got bricks of bank notes wrapped in plastic.
The government did not want to admit tit had a problem and so refused to print extremely-large denominations. People resorted to the bricks instead. No need to count the worthless bills.
At least we were smart enough to only exchange a single day’s worth. People told me inflation was going at almost one percent per day.
which could well be the answer to the OP’s question:
During a hyperinflation the central bank obviously cannot be seen to be proactive about issuing larger denominations because that would accelerate inflation still further. It would be central bankers’ clear duty to pretend to expect hyperinflation to end Real Soon Now.