Funny Money

The proceeds from Doctor Evil's latest scheme didn't go as far as he had hoped.

"They're saying starting next year we're gonna have to start paying our taxes in gold. You know your money's bad when the people who print it don't want it."

—Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa

What happens when you combine Acceptable Targets and the classic fascination tourists have with foreign currency? This trope, of course.

Jokes about the worthlessness of Ruritanian currency are a comedy staple. Sadly, with the advent of the Euro and the retirement of the Italian lira, some favorite targets have gone. Other currencies lost include the Belgian Franc and the Slovene tolar.

Fortunately for comedians, there are always more countries competing to have the most absurd exchange rates. Or the biggest number of zeroes after that first 1.

See also Ridiculous Future Inflation. For the other kind of "funny money", see Counterfeit Cash.

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Examples of Funny Money include:

Anime and Manga

• In Axis Powers Hetalia, Germany is in a lot of debt to France and all his money is worthless. So Germany gets Italy to make cuckoo clocks for him, and pays him to do so. Italy is thrilled to receive all this money, even though he knows it's worth less than the paper it's printed on.

Comic Books

• In one issue of Will Eisner's The Spirit, The Spirit's sidekick Ebony White travels to a desert kingdom to sell a valuable jewel. In exchange, he receives one billion of that country's currency. When he gets back home, he discovers the exchange rate for all that money is about 1.25¢. He promptly spends it all on hot dogs and ice cream at a local diner.
• One Don Rosa Donald Duck story featured a wanted poster citing a reward of "one bajillion pecos ($20)".
• "Awful Flight", a Funny Animal parody of the Canadian supehero team Alpha Flight, has one of the team excitedly point out a dollar on the ground. When the others ask what the big deal is, he explains that it's a US dollar! They're rich!

Film

• In Eurotrip, the characters make it to Slovakia by accident and find they only have $1.83 US on them—which, apparently, makes them close to being millionaires and grants them access to a lavish hotel room. (Naturally, this joke doesn't work anymore since Slovakia adopted the euro.)
• In Canadian Bacon, Bud (John Candy) and co. get pulled over for driving a truck covered in Canadian insult graffiti written in English, but not French. The fine is $1,000 Canadian, or $10 American... and they have to add the French translations to the truck.
• The film version of The Dukes of Hazzard has this exchange between the Dukes and a college kid they've suckered into analyzing a core sample they've given him: "How does 24,000 yen a year sound?" "Sounds like 40 bucks."
  • It's about $240 in reality.
• Street Fighter: Two of Bison's mooks steal a safe-full of his money, only to find out that it's just worthless notes with Bison's face on them (presumably to be made official currency after he conquers the world).
  • They are Bison Dollars. Each one shall be worth 5 British Pounds. For that is the exchange rate the Bank of England will set once he kidnaps their queen!

Literature

• In "The Fifth Elephant", Wolfgang von Uberwald mentions that the winner of a deadly contest gets the considerable sum of four hundred crowns. Our hero, Commander Vimes, determined to show no fear, sneers: "What is that in Ankh-Morpork dollars, do you know? About a dollar fifty?"
• In Robert A. Heinlein's The Number of the Beast it notes that the alternate-future U.S. went through a huge hyperinflation, and one New Dollar is worth 1,000 "old" dollars.
• In an Older Than Radio moment Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, was on a cruise that stopped in at the, Canary Islands, where many of the passengers went ashore to a restaurant. Clearly not having been adequately briefed on the concept of exchange rates, when the bill was presented for "24,000 reis" for cigars, and "18,000 reis" for wine, and so on, the passenger who had offered to pay paled in horror, gave the proprietor of the place $70 in gold, and informed him that that was all he had. The proprietor had to go and get someone else to translate the amounts of local currency to dollars before the situation stabilized - at a price somewhere nearer to $5 than $5,000.
• In Snow Crash, most world currencies are exchangeable, with the exception of Federal Reserve Notes, which are used pretty much exclusively by employees of the almost-defunct US Government and considered effectively worthless by everyone else. The remains of the US government draft a memo to prevent old billion-dollar bills from being used as toilet paper, because a single square of toilet paper is worth more more than a $1bn bill.
• In Lois McMaster Bujold's The Warrior's Apprentice, the protagonist, Miles Vorkosigan, is paid in millifenigs. They are described as making "an eye-catching toilet paper"' and become a swear word within a page of their introduction.
  • Except that after Miles won the war he was hired to fight, millifenigs begun to be traded again, and got a relatively decent rate.
  • In a later book in the series, Mirror Dance, it is revealed that Miles has a framed millifenig on his bedroom wall.
• This quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy mentions three cases of funny money

The Guide: In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altarian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems.^[1] Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination.

• • This is also some Self Deprecating Humor, since the Galactibanks are the products of Douglas Adams' imagination.
  • Another bit in The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy has the survivors of a colony ship crash (who were deemed a completely useless chunk of another planet's population) have a fiscal policy update at their staff meeting. They note that since they have chosen the leaf as their form of currency, everyone is extremely rich. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a bit of inflation, with current exchange rates being three decidious forests per ship's peanut. The proposed solution is a massive deforestation campaign to increase the value of currently held leaves.
• In the Timeline-191 series, the Confederate States of America win the Civil War and remain their own country, but then lose the world's equivalent of World War I. This causes Confederate banknotes to rapidly decrease in value, to the point where people have to race to spend any money they get their hands on before prices rise again. It takes a few years to get the economy under control again, by which time the banks had started printing one billion dollar notes (now rendered worthless themselves by federal decree, not that anyone would be able to give change for them anyway).
• In one of the adventures of The Mad Scientists' Club, the club members manage to extract a concrete plug from a Civil War-era cannon in the town square in order to get a bag of money stashed in it by a fleeing criminal years before. The bag is indeed in there, and contains a fortune -- in Confederate bills.

Live Action TV

• The Renford Rejects featured a joke about the Italian lira.

"I've just won 10,000 lira!" "That's £3.50".

• • In Ladri di Saponette a time-traveler innocently puts ten thousand lire into a collection for a wedding gift circa 1948, bringing him under suspicion both for the amount and because it's a note from 1989.
• In an episode of Family Matters Waldo is sent to prison in the fictional country of "Santo Porto" for trying to steal treasured artifact: A cheesy "I Heart Santo Porto" salsa bowl, technically the oldest bowl in the country. Carl and Urkel spend the episode trying to break Waldo out of jail until they're told that his bail is only $30 in US currency.
• One of the best examples is from An American in Canada. The titular character is mocking the strength of the Canadian dollar by giving the bartender an American twenty and getting back a Canadian twenty and a Canadian beer, as his Canadian friend watches. Of course, being an American, he does not realize that there is more alcohol in the beer, so he immediately passes out.
  • Because of the recent parity, an episode of CSI New York had the discovery of a bag containing 250,000 Canadian dollars. As this was the same amount in US dollars, no-one made a joke.
• An episode of Breaker High (a high school on a cruise ship) took the cast to a far off country in Africa or something. Two characters eventually get conned out of thousands of dollars by a shady business man saying the smallest amount of money he has is 1,000,000. It eventually turns out to be worth $7.50 US.
• Inverted in an episode of Cheers: Frasier tips a bellhop the equivalent of $100 US because he's overestimated the exchange rate. Soon the entire staff of the hotel shows up hoping for extravagant tips.
• Friends also jokes about the Italian lira. After Monica's new rich boyfriend Pete invites her for Italian food and then takes her to a restaurant in Italy, she insists on paying for the meal. He advises her to "throw another thousand on that" because so far she's paid "about 60 cents".
• Played with in the Top Gear Vietnam special, where the presenters were sent to Vietnam and given 15 million đồng to buy a vehicle (complete with said đồng being delivered to them in shoe boxes full of paper cash). The presenters' initial glee at finally being given a reasonable budget for one of these challenges quickly fizzled out when they realized that it equated to about $1,000 US (or £487 in their case).
• The M*A*S*H episode "Change Day" involved the army issuing new scrip to the soldiers, and the Korean locals would be forbidden from exchanging the soon-to-be-worthless scrip they had been paid over the years by soldiers. Charles tried to pull a Get Rich Quick Scheme and purchased old scrip from the Koreans at 10¢ on the dollar. Hawkeye and BJ thwarted him by getting a friendly MP to close the road so that Charles was unable to pass. They then purchased $400 in old scrip from him at 10¢ on the dollar, exchanged it for new scrip, and refunded a soldier's stolen money, leaving Charles to eat a huge loss.
• One episode of Simon and Simon saw the brothers imprisoned in an imaginary Latin American dictatorship, sentenced to pay a hefty fine (something like "a hundred thousand pistartes", or whatever the fake currency was). While in jail, they meet an ex-pat American and relate to them their doubts about paying such a "large" amount. When told about the fine, the ex-pat says, "Guys... that's about fifty bucks!" The brothers Simon are soon out of jail.
• Invoked and then Averted in an episode of JAG. Harm ends up in a fender bender caused by a beautiful Italian girl, who doesn't want any legal trouble and offers him several thousand Lira (in the form of a wad of cash) as compensation. Harm points out that she's offering him less than twenty dollars. It's only later that Harm learns she is Admiral Chegwidden's daughter, of course.
• The Canadian dollar being Funny Money was a running gag on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, mostly because regular Colin Mochrie was Canadian.

Music

• There's an Art Brut song called "18,000 Lira" about a failed bank robbery, which concludes: "sounds like a lot of money."

Newspaper Comics

• FoxTrot used this: Jason gets paid $10, adds it to the money he had under his mattress, and announces that he's a millionaire (in Turkish lira). He spends the rest of the week running around acting like a stereotypical rich guy, reverting back to his normal self after he spends his money ("Wow, three whole comic books," snarks Peter).
• Dilbert has the fictional country of Elbonia, where there someone wanted to buy something, and asked if "this" was enough, however much he actually had. The reply was something along the lines of "a minute ago, yes, but now it costs a hundred times more".
  • The inflation rate has risen to one billion percent in these strips, daily.
• In one strip of The Piranha Club (back when it was Ernie) sleazy con man Sid Fernwilter tries to pay with various rather obviously phony credit cards; the proprietor of the store refuses. He wants to write a check; the proprietor, who knows Sid's reputation, refuses. Finally Sid asks if the proprietor would except "cold hard cash" and confirms that this is "actual money". The proprietor accepts... and is paid in 30000 "Irkutskian Slobotniks".

Recorded and Stand Up Comedy

• When the New Zealand dollar was going really strong a little while ago, the morning news made some jokes like this at the expense of the U.S. dollar... even though the NZ dollar was still only about 85 U.S. cents.
• Since the British pound sterling is one of the largest units of currency in the world, jokes like this come up from time to time in British comedy, along the lines of, "I know a couple of people who just made $100 million US, which I think, if I've done the maths correctly, is roundabout £7.50"
  • As of the 2007 financial crisis, this was inverted to jokes about being 1:1 with the euro and US dollar.
• A show called Goodness Gracious Me (about Indian immigrants in Britain) included "The Six Million Rupee Man".
  • "We can rebuild him. We have the technology: we just don't have the ideal exchange rate."
  • Robot Chicken did the same gag with the Six Million Peso Man (who upon being completed immediately disappears past the US border).

Mexican Government Man: "That's 283 American dollars we won't see again..."

• Australian comedian Adam Hills often jokes about the Barmy Army taunting Australian cricket fans in a bar in Newcastle by singing, "We get three dollars to the pound!"

"When you're heckling the exchange rate, that's creative!"

• One comedian's bit on pesos: "I love shopping in Mexico. It's like a giant dollar store. At what point does your money become so worthless that you just say 'Okay, we have to go back to trading chickens; this just isn't working.'"

Tabletop RPG

• In the Shadowrun campaign "Virtual Seattle", the setting is a somewhat post-apocalyptic America where the currency is the New-Yen and the dominant global economy is Japanese. In one event, the players are trying to steal information from a military ship when a Russian submarine unrelated to either party attacks. The Russians, if communicated with, will offer to pay the PCs one million Rubles if they join forces and let the Russians keep the ship once the PCs get the information they are after. Even though there was no published New-Yen to Ruble exchange rate, the players all assumed it was a Funny Money offer and declined the alliance.
  • Funnily enough, The Sourcebook "Shadows of Asia" has the exchange rate, as of 2064, as 1 Ruble =.33 Nuyen. That's still 330,000 nuyen, which isn't a small amount of money.

Video Games

• In "Tropico 3" Absolute Power El Presidente can choose to print more money, while giving money in the short term it permanently raises the price of everything else, the more money printed the more the economy becomes inflated. Eventually everything becomes too expensive to afford.
• The browser-based Kingdom of Loathing had a contributor reward called "Mr. Accessory" (nicknamed "Mr. A") that gave a + 15 to all stats for the price of $10. Those who donated $10 Canadian could receive a "Mr. Eh?", that initially gave a + 12 to stats, which was meant to reflect its relative monetary value. As implied, the value of the bonus was adjusted to better match the rising value of the Canadian dollar ? eventually requiring a Word of God acknowledgment that it would never be more powerful than a Mr. A.
• In the online game/community NationStates, each nation can name its own currency, whose value—relative to other in-game currencies and real-world currencies—is determined by the player's policy decisions. Quite a few fall into this territory.
• In Dubloon, there's a man who is eager to sell you his goodies for 10,000 Farquads.^[2] Once an exchange service is open, you can find out that 10,000 Farquads are worth 1 dubloon. Said man is also Black.^[3]
• In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, the exchange rate between Mushroom Kingdom coins and Beanbean Kingdom coins is absolutely insane. In the beginning of the game, however many Mushroom coins you have- usually at least a hundred- turns out to be worth exactly ten Beanbean coins. By the end, however, the Mushroom currency has apparently devalued off-screen dramatically, to the point where 99,999,999 Mushroom coins is equal to 99 Beanbean coins.
• In an early mission in Just Cause 2, while Rico is buying some information from an informant, Panau is implied to have this kind of money.

Informant: A pleasure doing business with you.
Rico: Considering the value of the Panauan buck, shooting you would have been more expensive.

• Inflation exists as a mechanic in Europa Universalis; while the player is unlikely to let it get too out of hand, some AI can get into a bankruptcy loop that results in both an incredibly unstable country and having to pay three or four times as much as everyone else for everything. (Inflation points increase the price of all things that cost money by 1% each, and are gained by event, reliance on gold, or minting coins - the equivalent of printing money).
• In the Fallout series this occurs repeatedly from currency losing its backing
  • In Fallout 2 the player can find a stash of bottle caps, used as a currency in the previous game, which are now worthless with the introduction of the gold standard backed NCR dollar
  • In 3 and New Vegas the player can find "pre-war money", seemingly a stack of 100 $1 bills, as a semi-common item. While supposedly worthless in-story it has no weight yet a value of 10 so it's worth picking up all of it you can. Presumably the paper is still relatively rare yet useful and thus maintains some value, though other paper items aren't worth as much).
    • Averted in the New Vegas expansion Dead Money, as the pre-war machines will still take pre-war money and exchange it for chips that can be converted into valuable items.
  • In New Vegas the player can find NCR dollars. While not worthless, it is no longer backed with gold (the NCR's gold reserve was destroyed between the games) and has very poor value compared to the water backed bottle cap standard and precious metal based Legion coins.
  • In Tactics wasteland traders and Brotherhood quartermasters both use mutually exclusive currency.

Web Comics

• From Kid Radd: Radd is thrilled to get a $1,000 paycheck from his first week. Bogey says the amount is in binary, meaning it's really $8.
• Megatokyo has an exchange where Largo returns from his new job as "Great Teacher Largo", bragging about the money he made. Piro scans the bills and notes that Largo's salary for the day is 5,000 yen, or 50 US dollars.
  • Incidentally, that's about right. One yen is really (roughly) about one cent. Hence the Sight Gag in one strip where we see a 1¥ Arcade.
• Something*Positive had a gag where PeeJee gave Davan her lucky (Canadian) quarter. It didn't work—and PeeJee and Aubrey got mad, his apparently negative karma having killed the coin's good luck. Davan shoots back that it's "not like it was real money anyway", to which Aubrey grudgingly agrees.
• In this Touhou Doujin 4koma, Reimu convinces Marisa to donate to her shrine through use of one of her birds. Marisa drops a bill for 10,000 Zimbabwean dollars into Reimu's donation box (not even worth a single yen). The next strip has Reimu going on the warpath.

Western Animation

• In the Reality Show parody cartoon Drawn Together, 500 billion pesos are apparently the equivalent of 12 U.S. dollars.
• In an episode of Cow and Chicken, the two titular characters take a plane towards Canada after entering a funny home video contest, and they win 20,000 Canadian dollars... but little did they knew, that the exchange rate was $1 US = $80,000 Canadian, which means they just won 25 American cents...
• In an episode of Family Guy, when on a South American island Peter gets $37 out of his wallet. This makes him the richest man on the island.
• In an episode of The Simpsons, a representative for Russia asks the Olympic committee for Russia to host the Olympics as it would stimulate its economy and help its exchange rate of 1 US dollar to 50 rubles... which quickly escalates to over a thousand rubles.
  • "Where the U.S. dollar buys fifty rubles" *pager beeps* "One hundred rubles!" *pager beeps* "One THOUSAND rubles... I MUST GO!"
• A first-season episode of Scooby Doo saw Scooby as a potential heir to a share in a considerable fortune—a million American dollars. Turns out, while Colonel Sanders (no! not that Colonel Sanders!) had the million-dollar fortune... the dollars were in worthless Confederate paper money. No attempt is made to explain why the mansion isn’t noted as part of the estate, since it’d at least be worth something...
  • Or the fact that confederate money is highly valuable among collectors.
• In Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy, Eddy gets a (comically) huge envelope of money from a pen pal in Korea, and immediately tries to buy jawbreakers. Right before he gets tossed out of the store, Edd remarks:

Edd: This is foreign currency, Eddy! Virtually worthless in its present state!

• In Lilo and Stitch, Gantu realized he was getting paid with worthless bills with his employer's face on them, as they were to be worth something after he took over the universe.
• In The New Woody Woodpecker Show, Woody once found a Russian satellite that crashed and then he sold it to the junkyard for a few dollars. Later on, he learned the Russian Government offered five million units of their currency and he tried to get it back. After managing to get it back and take it to the Russians, he learned the money was worth less than the money he got when he sold it to the junkyard.
• The Jetsons: George once won the lottery. The prize was worth 7.5 million dollars when he won. However, the economy of Venus suffered a collapse before he exchanged it in American dollars, turning the prize worthless.
• In an episode of Metalocalypse, Nathan, now the governer of Florida, tries to solve the US' funding problem by introducing a new currency called Death Dollars and printing a lot of them. Needless to say, the money was totally worthless and ruined the already mostly destroyed state by driving them into an irrepairable recession.

Real Life

Truth in Television: Just look at all these examples of the consequences of hyperinflation:

Africa

• Zimbabwe's hyperinflation.

Asia

• During the 1997 Asian Currency/Financial Crisis, the Indonesian rupiah was devalued to the point that Indonesian students pulling part-time jobs in McDonald's could go home after a few week's work and trade in those Singaporean Dollars for millions of rupiah. Work in Singapore in a cheap job, go home and be a millionaire.
  • This hasn't changed much. In October 2009, a million rupiah is worth about US $106.
  • The exchange rate is deceptive, however. While the rate is cartoonishly steep, it is stable, and actually has moved sharply in the rupiah's favor over the past year.^[when?] If you happened to spend the last year and a half working in Indonesia and getting paid in US dollars, you basically took a 7% pay cut.
  • While living costs are ridiculously low compared to developed countries (a KFC meal set consisted of a wing, a riceball, and a cup of Pepsi will cost you US$0.9), prices of imported goods varies from cheaper ($45 for a brand-new Play Station 3 game, roughly half of locally mandated minimum monthly wage) to highway robbery ($1000 for an iPhone 4 on contract) .
• The South Korean Won is at approximately 1,000 Won = $1 US. Unfortunately, the largest size bill available to the general public is 10,000 Won, which with the varying exchange rates tends to be about an $8~$11 bill at most. Now Korean landlords, when renting to Americans, like their rent for the year up front, in cash...So every year to two years, a number of Americans are seen with large brown paper bags full of 10,000 Won bills. To give an idea, my family was living in a 4-bedroom apartment that cost 5,000,000 Won a month.
  • Currently in 2010, the largest size bill available to the general public is 50,000 Won, thank you very much.
  • The North Korean Won lost even more value in 2009.
• Prior to World War II, the Japanese Yen was worth around $12 in current (2009) U.S. currency, but faced a steep decline during and after. It was set at 360 to the dollar for a long time after the war, but now fluctuates with the market, usually hovering just over $0.01 since a few years ago.
  • In the prewar period, there were even smaller values: the Sen (1/100 Yen, and origin of the term Sento) and the Rin (1/10 Sen, or 1/1000 Yen). These fractional values became nigh on worthless after the War and were discontinued, though the Sen still pops up regularly in discussions of exchange rates and stock prices.
  • Nowadays the yen has notably appreciated, with 77 yen per $1, which has lead everyone to cry murder and to the historically largest currency interventions on the part of the Bank Of Japan. For the export-oriented economy like Japanese, the strong yen is the worst thing they would ever need.
• Because the Philippines used to rub shoulders with America during the Wars, the Philippine Peso used to be 1=1. Now it's somewhere between 1=50 and 1=40 and on a roller coaster ride between them. And it doesn't help that most restaurants / hospitals have Wartime photos of their first place with menus showing a full course dinner for 10 pesos, house calls for 3 pesos, and a delivery for 20. (Kids: Wow, everything was cheap in the past!! Adults: Why god, WHY?!?!)
• Mentioned above in the Top Gear example, $1 US Dollar equaled $15,000 Vietnamese đồng (pronounced "Dough-ng") back in 2008. At the time of this edit (mid-2010) It Got Worse: $1 USD = $19,000 VND.
• Hong Kong uses this trope properly (as in, the devaluation also allows for greater price differentials to people who care enough about it.) One US or Australian dollar is worth about $7–8 Hong Kong dollars; in the pricey tourist districts, that translates to just about the same prices back in the tourist's home country (cue first reaction looks of horror, however, when that beer costs $40HK). The rest of HK, however, gets $5 things, and as a result if you know where to look, you can get just about anything you want at a ridiculously low price.

Australia

• Don't make jokes like this about Australian currency without doing the research first. Not too long ago, the Aussie dollar was half an American one—not any more. Though you wouldn't know it from the prices we get charged for everything...
  • As of October 2010, we're flirting with 1:1 parity.
    • And as of April 2011, we're merrily skipping around the $1.05-1.10 marks. (The key to this is that while the American economy is having trouble, the Australian economy is doing rather well—particularly as the trade in the basic minerals abundant in Australia and in demand in Asia picks up).^[4]

Europe

• One of the best known examples is the German mark (not to be confused with the pre-Euro Deutsche Mark) from the interwar Weimar Republic. Destroyed by the war and without a single penny left to pay the war penalties, Germany had no choice but to run the presses until the whole debt was paid; as a result, the Mark's value collapsed, and the biggest banknote ever printed was the 100 quadrillion Mark bill, which was worth something around 24 US dollars!. When Stresemann became chancellor in 1923, the Rentenmark was issued at 1 RM = 1 trillion Marks.
  • At its height, one dollar traded for 420,000,000,000,000,000 marks. That's 420 billiards (long scale) or 420 quadrillion (short scale) marks!
  • It's a common misconception that hyperinflation was caused by the Weimar Government attempting to pay off its war debts by just printing money. The actual cause of hyperinflation was the 1923 Ruhr Crisis, when the Weimar Republic missed a payment on its war reparations, prompting a joint French-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr. The Ruhr was Germany's industrial heartland, so when the German Government called for a general strike in opposition to the French, it crippled the German economy. Cue massive hyperinflation.
    • Actually, the Weimar's default on its payment was just one a long series of defaults in which Germany deliberately refused to pay reparations, despite the fact that it was well within their power to do so. This is what eventually prompted the occupation of the Ruhr. When the workers in the Ruhr went on strike, the German government decided to keep paying them with printed currency in order to reward them for "passively resisting." Cue massive hyperinflation.
  • There is a famous image of a woman feeding the stove with money, since it's worth less than firewood. Money was also used as wallpaper.
  • There is a popular urban legend (attributed to many times and places) about two women who try buying bread at a bakery. They had a huge pile of worthless Marks in a wheelbarrow outside. When they went back out someone had stolen the wheelbarrow but left the money on the floor.
  • Another one involves someone going into a restaurant and ordering an egg and coffee, which was (say) 7,000 marks. An hour later, when the bill came, the price had risen to 10,000.
  • Or the sad story of a German family who sold their house to emigrate to America. When they arrived in Hamburg, they had to find out that not only was the money for their house not enough to pay the ticket to the US, but not even enough for the train ticket back to their hometown.
  • There are stamps that still exist that are for the postage of 20 billion Marks (actually 20 milliard, due to differences in how the US and Europe calculate one billion, but it is still an unimaginably huge number to mail a letter...) So many of them were printed and so few were actually used that you can get mint uncancelled specimens for little more than a song, but a genuinelly cancelled and postally-used one could set you back a pretty pfennig.
• During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the value of Polish zloty (currency code: PLZ) fell so badly that before the redenomination in 1995, the largest bill in circulation (introduced in 1992) was "only" two million zlotys - worth roughly 80 USD at the time. The new money (currency code: PLN) was established by dropping four zeroes from the old one's value (1 PLN = 10000 PLZ) and in 2011, the largest bill in use, 200 PLN (introduced in 1995), is worth roughly 70 USD.
• Of course, these examples pale into comparison with the post-war Hungarian pengő, which experienced the single worst example of hyperinflation in history. The 100 million B-pengő (i.e. 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 pengő) note is the single highest denomination bill ever issued, according to The Other Wiki. And that banknote was effectively worthless. (A 1 milliard B-Pengő note was printed but not issued.) At the height of the hyperinflation, prices doubled in every fifteen hours.
  • To quote one source (Postwar by Tony Judt) "by the time the pengo was replaced by the forint in August 1946 the dollar value of all Hungarian banknotes in circulation was just one-thousandth of one cent." Most triumphant example indeed.
    • The modern forint is not in a good position either, with exchange rate being roughly $1 == 200 Ft, although this is going to change as Hungary is considering adopting the euro sometime around 2012 <current year>+5 years.
• The early-90s Yugoslav dinar (image) holds the record for the most zeroes printed on a banknote.
  • That is until Zimbabwe created a 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollar bill in mid-January 2009.
    • And a 100 trillion-dollar bill a couple months later.
    • After going through a long period of hyperinflation (at one point the inflation rate was over 230 million percent, and the money supply was growing by 658 billion percent) and three revaluations, the Zimbabwean dollar was suspended in January 2009, and finally abandoned in April 2009. Before the third revaluation, the exchange rate was 300 trillion Zimbabwean dollars to 1 US dollar. ATMs were unable to cope with the amounts of money people needed to withdraw, producing overflow errors. One 2005 Zimbabwe dollar was worth 10 septillion (10^25) 2009 Zimbabwe dollars.
• The French franc was replaced in 1960 by the new franc (nicknamed 'heavy franc') at a hundred to one. See the Casino Royale novel for an example of what it was like before. Old people in France used to think in "old francs" until the euro was introduced.
• One Eastern European currency which subverts this trope is the Latvian lats, one of which is actually worth more than a pound sterling. British holidaymakers soon realize that the one-lats pint of local alus, whilst still cheaper than the extortionate prices at home, isn't quite as much of a bargain as it first appears.
  • Tourists often get burned in Kuwait, not realising that 1 dinar is worth US$3.50.
• Russian Civil War era money was the king of this trope. It was not only notoriously worthless (one million rubles was a small money unit even after revaluations, and pre-revaluation million rubles was pretty much toilet paper), but it also was not unified. Every town or petty government issued their own scrip, resulting a total of thousands of currency units in one country. The most notorious was the kerenki, the scrip of the Provisional Government, that was so poorly made that any printing device could be used to make indistinguishable counterfeits (and indeed, every printer in the country was printing kerenki). Later they became so worthless that they were not even cut into individual banknotes, but rather used as 1x1 meter uncut sheets (the money unit was called "a meter of kerenki"). When someone needed less than a meter, the sheet was manually cut with scissors or even torn by hands.
  • 1990s Russia was hit by this again, though not as hard. The prices grew from rubles to hundreds thousands rubles in some years after the fall of the Soviet Union. This time, the revaluation in 1998 proved to be relatively stable, with the copecks still (barely) in use. An early 1990s attempt to reintroduce local scrip (the "Ural franc") failed miserably.
  • The ruble is still pretty bad though, and is currently worth about 2,5 eurocents (about 4 USD cents, roughly). the most important part, however, is that it is stable, which means that you don't lose money simply by having it.
    • That's the whole point—exchange rate per se doesn't really mean much (and is rather easily manipulated by speculators), its dynamics, however, is the key. Since 2000 ruble is on the rise and is often said by the analysts to still be undervalued. And if the plans to chop two zeros off again would ever come to fruition, then the ruble would cost three to four dollars—but that won't mean that anything really changed.
• In an amusing reversal, the Cyprus Pound is worth rather more than the British one (which is in turn the biggest well-known currency^[5]). Which has led to more than one tourist giving a massive tip on the basis that "It's only Funny Money" only to realize (usually after sobering up) that the £70(Cyprus) tip they gave works out to about £100 (sterling).
  • Was—it, and the Maltese lira, also worth more than the pound, were replaced by the euro in 2008.
• The Italian lira was an easy target for this trope. Why? Well, when it was replaced by the euro, one euro was worth 1936,27 lira.

The Middle East

• The perennial joke-butt that was the Turkish lira recently revalued by dropping six zeroes. The exchange rate had previously been £1 ~ 2,000,000 Turkish lira. This is quite a common practice when currency becomes hyperinflated.
  • A bit used once on the Howard Stern show was "Who Wants To Be A Turkish Millionaire" where a series of not-surprisingly scantily-clad, very attractive young women were asked a series of trivia questions, with the winner receiving a million Turkish lire. In other words, about fifty cents.
• The Israeli lira was replaced ten-to-one by the sheqel in 1980. The sheqel was replaced by the new sheqel in 1985 at a thousand to one.
• The Egyptian pound, with its current exchange rate of about six pounds to the dollar ($0.16 to the pound) doesn't seem so bad...until you realize how far it's fallen. When the pound was originally established in the early 20th century, it was worth exactly one British guinea—a pound and a shilling, or £1.05 when decimalised.^[6] Eventually, circumstances were such that the Egyptian pound appreciated against the pound sterling—eventually hitting £2 to £3 at some point. However, part of the economic restructuring started in The Seventies under Anwar Sadat (and continued since then) involved letting the currency float—and float it has, all the way down to its current value. This had three peculiar effects:

1. 1. People started keeping their money in foreign currency as much as they could.
   2. A large number of perpetual leases became absurdly cheap. Tenants in apartments that had been rented out for 2 or 4 or 6 or 8 pounds a month under perpetual leases became absurdly undervalued (with rents now being in the hundreds or thousands monthly), yet they kept paying the same rates. Consequently, Egypt instituted a rule against perpetuities, i.e. banned indefinite or effectively indefinite contracts, in the 80s (when this issue first showed up).
   3. Egyptians—especially older ones—are liable to see their own currency as Funny Money, while foreigners are likely to say, "It's cheap, but it's not that bad."

North America

• The Canadian dollar used to have a poor exchange rate with the U.S. dollar. The exchange rate tends to fluctuate with the price of West Canada Select crude oil. At a couple of key points (the Arab oil embargo of 1973, the subprime mortgage collapse of the 2008-09 Great recession) it was worth more than the US buck, which isn't funny, 'cept to Canadians.
  • It isn't funny to Canadian business that export to US, either. Stronger Canadian dollar means that Americans need to spend more for Canadian products; thus the American buying power (of Canadian products) decrease.
    • This put the RPG company "Guardians of Order" out of business. Paying for almost everything in Canadian dollars (they were based in Canada) and being paid for your product in American dollars (it's a much larger market for tabletop gaming) was nice under the older exchange rates. When the US dollar tanked, they wound up taking IIRC a 30% cut in income, and couldn't sell enough to make up the difference.
    • In any case, a flood of fracking oil onto the markets in 2014 sent the "loonie" (Canada's dollar coin has a loon on one side) tumbling. Instead of being more valuable than the US greenback, it was soon trading at seventy cents.
  • Despite being pretty close, though, the exchange rate is fodder for humor. It doesn't matter which side of the border you're on, either; it just determines if it's mockery or sarcasm.
  • A weak Canadian dollar was part of the reason for the NHL's push for expansion into the United States about twenty years ago. Since the Canadian dollar's rise, the NHL is talking about opening a franchise in, possibly, Quebec City (which hasn't had its own team since the Nordiques moved to Colorado in 1995). Even more strident has been the gossip about the Phoenix team returning to Winnipeg; as of May 24, 2010, the Free Press has carried a front-page article or headline about the Jets' possible return in every single issue published since November 2009.
    • And as of May 31, 2011, Winnipeg has an NHL hockey team once again—previously the Atlanta Thrashers, now the new Winnipeg Jets. Atlanta is the only U.S. city to lose an NHL team to Canada, and this team is the second they've lost. (The previous one was the Atlanta Flames, which moved to Calgary.) No word yet on the...team in Phoenix.
  • A lot of provinces have printed their own money. Some did so because they were independent colonies (or even separate countries) at the time, but in other cases the influence of an ultra-rightist political movement called Social Credit was at fault. A Social Credit government in Alberta even tried to nationalize the banks operating in the province (yes, conservative nationalizers!) and when that didn't work they issued "prosperity certificates", a notorious form of worthless local currency known in Alberta even today, eighty years later, as "funny money". Thus began the popular Canadian stereotype of Albertans as weird.
  • Look in any Canadian's wallet, and you're probably going to find some Canadian Tire Money. While these notes are officially not money, but "cash bonus coupons" redeemable for merchandise at any Canadian Tire store, many other businesses in Canada will also accept them as cash.
    • One enterprising criminal was caught smuggling counterfeit Canadian Tire money into the country
• Civil War-era Confederate paper money was notoriously worthless (some of the rare bills are far more valuable now, as collector's items). The North tried printing counterfeit bills to undermine the Confederate Dollar, but success was hard to gauge. They were easy to spot (they looked too good) but they still circulated, since they weren't any less worthless than the real thing.
• Before that, paper money issued by the Continental Congress and the individual states were also pretty much worthless, leading to the phrase 'not worth a Continental'. There's a reason the Constitution specifically forbids states to issue paper money. Even George Washington once complained that you needed a wagon of money to buy a wagon of hay.
  • However, due to a loophole, states were allowed to issue charters for banks to issue money. This led to nearly one thousand different institutions issuing money at one point (sometime in the 1850s), each with multiple bills. Not only were there countless counterfeits, but it got so confusing that it became possible to pass bills from fake (but realistic-looking) banks as genuine; in some cases, these were better printed than those issued by legitimate banks. Luckily, the Civil War led to the establishment of a national paper currency.
• The Mexican peso occasionally gets this treatment, even though the actual exchange rate has been 1 US dollar = 10 pesos for most of the decade, being currently around $1 USD = $13 MXN; this has to do mostly because Mexico is the neighboring country and therefore an Acceptable Targets, and partly because the peso was Funny Money between 1982 and 1994: after a series of wrong doings by the presidents from that time, and after a sudden fall on the petroleum's price, the Mexican peso collapsed and the entire economy sank to the bottom (along with a sharp rise in crime during these times). In 1993, the new peso was issued at an exchange rate of N$1 = $1,000; the "new" was then dropped in 1996.
  • Notice that the symbol for a peso is also $ (common practice in Mexico is to draw the $ with two bars or appending USD when using dollars). This can make it tricky for American tourists to read from a price list, particularly in towns like Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez or Cancún where business is transacted in American currency just as often as in Mexican currency. Hilarity ensues.

South America

• One US dollar is worth around 500 Chilean pesos. Why they haven't dropped three zeroes like Mexico did, no one knows...
  • It's not necessary, the economy is running fine and a massive money reprint would bring more inconveniences to the public, the 5 pesos coin behaves exactly the same as a cent (including being the chump change that no one enjoys having in their pockets) and the 1 peso coin is quite rare (and worthless).
  • In recent years has become an aversion in fact: While the Chileans did drop the cents they had during the 80's and then went into a progressive inflation during the 90s, compared to the Dollar, now, 500 chilean pesos per dollar is cheap. During the 90's the a Dollar was worth around 1000 Chilean Pesos in the most extreme cases. While the inflation, heavily controled by the goverment, has really rendered the 1 peso coin worthless, the Chilean Peso internationally is in fact strong: In the middle of the 2000's, there's a time the Dollar went to be worth 500 Chilean Pesos not because something wrong happened with the Dollar, that was because the Chilean Peso was getting stronger!
    • On a tangentially related note, Chile misspelled its own name on its 50-peso coin. Said coins are really sought after, since: 1.- Fake rumors began running that the government was issuing a 25000 pesos (around 50 USD) reward for each one, and 2.- Chilean numismatists are actually offering that much for them online.
  • If you actually want to hear about actual Chilean Funny Money, try with the Chilean Escudo, their currency during the 60's and 70's. It was issued in 1960 and replaced in 1975 by the New Peso, Today's Currency: While around 100 New Chilean Pesos were worth 1 Dollar, 1 Peso was worth about 1000 Escudos!
• Brazil faced hyperinflation several times over the 20th century, always ending up introducing a new currency only to see it lose value again. This ended in 1994 with the Plano Real, in which (as This American Life put it) the government lied to the people to restore confidence in the currency...It Worked. (Here's that TAL episode, if you're interested.)
• And then there's Venezuela, whose economy and currency have been a basket case since oil prices imploded in 2014. There have been multiple redenominations of currency (the Bolivar, the Strong Bolivar, the Sovereign Bolivar...), all of them ultimately pretty much worthless.

1. ↑ In the TV (and possibly radio) version, it uses "doesn't count as money"
2. ↑ He doesn't accept dubloons.
3. ↑ Maybe he is from Zimbabwe?
4. ↑ The same applies to Canada, but the Canadian economy is sufficiently tied to the American to cause a moderate level of concern; as a result, the Canadian dollar is usually slightly weaker than the Australian these days.
5. ↑ And the fifth overall, as of this edit, behind the Kuwaiti and Bahraini dinars, the Omani rial and the Latvian lats.
6. ↑ The pound is a fairly new currency; in the late 19th century, the main currency was the qirsh or piastre (plural qurush). The term for the Egyptian pound in Arabic, gineeh, is derived from "guinea", which was worth almost exactly 100 qurush when the currency was established. Since this was awfully convenient--decimalisation without the fuss!--the Egyptian government decided to just make that the standard currency unit.