History Main / RidiculousFutureInflation

* {{VideoGame/Overwatch}} takes place in the 2070s. On the Hollywood map, buckets of popcorn are priced at over a hundred American dollars. Then again, it might be a joke about how movie theatres tend to overcharge on snacks.

* In ''Webcomic/{{Sinfest}}'', [[http://www.sinfest.net/view.php?date=2009-02-21 inflation is specifically linked to the Weimar Republic]].
* ''Webcomic/QuantumVibe'': Used as an AuthorTract [[http://www.quantumvibe.com/strip?page=228 against fiat currency]].

** According to [[http://bttf.wikia.com/wiki/Blast_from_the_Past the wiki]], Marty sold his '80s pocket money as antique currency to pay for Gray's Sports Almanac.

* A huge problem in the South during the UsefulNotes/AmericanCivilWar, due to the Confederate government simply printing more money to pay for the war. As one politician put it: "You bring your money to market in a basket, and bring home what you buy in your pocketbook." An additional problem was that the CSA's currency was redemption-based, with the theory that a few years after the war, one could turn it in for 'hard' currency. Thus, when the South was defeated, the money became 'As worthless as a Confederate bill'.

** According to ''VideoGame/SaintsRow2'', gas is about $8.40 per gallon. This is lampshading the minor gas crisis that was occurring during the game's development, when gas was raising about 40 cents per month (coming to a head of about $4.50 a gallon in some states.)
** Continued in ''VideoGame/SaintsRow3'', where gas station signs advertise gas at $14.50/gallon.

* Less well-known than the German hyperinflation, the worst inflation yet happened in Hungary in the wake of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. Hungary initially responded by making the "milpeng&#337" (1 million peng&#337) the smallest denomination of bill they printed, and when that was rapidly overtaken by inflation they introduced "b.-peng&#337" (1 trillion peng&#337, pronounced "bilpeng&#337"). Each of these had bills printed in denominations ranging from 10,000 to 1 trillion, meaning that during the b.-peng&#337 period there was what amounted to a 1 sextillion peng&#337 bill. When the pengő currency was replaced by the forint on 1st August 1946, the conversion rate was 4 x 10[[superscript:29]] (a 4 followed by ''29'' zeros, or 400 octillion) pengő to a single forint. To give you an idea of just ''how'' ridiculous this number is: if you could buy ''one atom'' of hydrogen for one pengő -- just one atom -- you [[HiroshimaAsAUnitOfMeasure could fill ]] UsefulNotes/TheHindenburg for twenty-five forints. (And, at 2010 exchange rates, that would run you a little over 12¢ US, less than a tenth of a euro.) Following the end of the hyperinflation, the next currency-related problem they had to deal with was a shortage of currency-quality paper.

* In Germany under the Weimar Republic, it did reach a point when a newspaper cost 100 billion marks, and you literally needed wheelbarrows of marks just to buy groceries. In some cases, the wheelbarrow itself was worth more than its contents. Germans of that era would burn wads of banknotes as fuel during the winter, owing to the money being cheaper to burn than the wood/paraffin alternative.

* Less well-known than the German hyperinflation, the worst inflation yet happened in Hungary in the wake of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. When the pengő currency was replaced by the forint on 1st August 1946, the conversion rate was 4 x 10[[superscript:29]] (a 4 followed by ''29'' zeros) pengő to a single forint. To give you an idea of just ''how'' ridiculous this number is: if you could buy ''one atom'' of hydrogen for one pengő -- just one atom -- you [[HiroshimaAsAUnitOfMeasure could fill ]] UsefulNotes/TheHindenburg for twenty-five forints. (And, at 2010 exchange rates, that would run you a little over 12¢ US, less than a tenth of a euro.) Following the end of the hyperinflation, the next currency-related problem they had to deal with was a shortage of currency-quality paper.
* Happened in the modern times in Zimbabwe where the exchange rate at late June, 2008 was 20 billion $Z to 1 $US. In 2007 the inflation rate was going up so fast that golfers would prepay for their drinks before starting their round because the price would have gone up significantly by the time they finished the 18th hole, and that waiting a day to buy bread meant you could no longer afford to do so. The economy is right now pretty much running on foreign currency: the Zimbabwean dollar is so worthless that it's actually more cost effective to sell the currency for use as recycled paper (and get paid in real money) than it is to use it for its face value. A Zimbabwean newspaper printed its ads on Zimbabwean money... [[HumiliationConga Zimbabwean government banned]] ''its own'' currency in April 2009. In June 2015, Zimbabwe officially abandoned its currency, choosing instead to use the US Dollar. Before then the inflation was exponential... on a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ZWDvUSDchart.png logarithmic graph]]

** Interestingly Confederate Dollars ''today'' command quite high collectors prices - sometimes higher than their face value measured in either Dollars 1:1 or gold. Some have even gone on to ''counterfeit'' a currency that was not worth anything at the time it was legal tender of a country ''that does not exist any more''.

* Even gold, the proverbial rock in the tempest of economic turbulence, is not immune to inflation. In 1342, Mansa Musa of the Mali Empire was passing through Cairo his pilgrimage to Mecca. Either he did not quite notice the prices on the other side of the Sahara or he wanted to make a reputation for himself (or both), He ended up spending so much gold in the bazaar of Cairo that the gold market in the Mediterranean region collapsed for a decade.

** During the early days of yen (19th century) you could find a 1 yen banknote, while today 1 yen is the least worth ''coin''.

* Less well-known than the German hyperinflation, the worst inflation yet happened in Hungary in the wake of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. When the pengő currency was replaced by the forint on 1st August 1946, the conversion rate was 4 x 10[[superscript:29]] (a 4 followed by ''29'' zeros) pengő to a single forint. To give you an idea of just ''how'' ridiculous this number is: if you could buy ''one atom'' of hydrogen for one pengő -- just one atom -- you [[HiroshimaAsAUnitOfMeasure could fill ]] UsefulNotes/TheHindenburg for twenty-five forints. (And, at 2010 exchange rates, that would run you a little over 12¢ US, less than a tenth of a euro.)

* 1996, Poland revalued its currency by knocking off four of the zeros; there was a period in which both old and new currency was accepted and goods were double-priced accordingly.

*** One of the interesting aspects of the yen is that you won't find it among [[http://www.profitconfidential.com/u-s-dollar/the-10-most-expensive-currency/ the top ten valued currencies]]. However, if you treat the yen like any other subdivision (say, the US cent), it's equal to the ''[[UsefulNotes/{{Switzerland}} Swiss Franc]]''. It's sort of mindscrew to think about buying a can of soda in "100 cents".

*** One of the interesting aspects of the yen is that you won't find it among [[http://www.profitconfidential.com/u-s-dollar/the-10-most-expensive-currency/ the top ten valued currencies]]. However, if you treat the yen like any other subdivision (say, the US cent), it beats the ''[[UsefulNotes/{{Switzerland}} Swiss Franc]].'' It's sort of mindscrew to think about buying a can of soda in "100 cents".

*** One of the interesting aspects of the yen is that you won't find it among [[http://www.profitconfidential.com/u-s-dollar/the-10-most-expensive-currency/ the top ten valued currencies]]. However, if you treat the yen like any other subdivision (say, the US cent), it beats the ''[[UsefulNotes/Switzerland Swiss Franc]].'' It's sort of mindscrew to think about buying a can of soda in "100 cents".

*** One of the interesting aspects of the yen is that you won't find it among the top ten currencies that are valuable. However, if you treat the yen like any other subdivision (say, the US cent), it becomes one of the most valued currencies. It's sort of mindscrew to think about buying a can of soda in "100 cents".

As a rule of thumb, prices double every 23 years with an average inflation rate of 3 percent, and every 10 years if the average rate is 7 percent. When a show pulls out this trope, use this to compare what future prices are actually likely to be at that time.

** Then again, given the amount of time that has passed and assuming the ten billion dollar bill is equivalent to a dollar today, it STILL averages out to an inflation of less than 3% annually, which is within most nations' economic goals.
* The ''Film/AustinPowers'' films play this trope every which way:

* Might seem to be the case in ''VideoGame/EVEOnline'' as the simplest of commodities cost hundreds of thousands ISK to millions, high-end ships cost hundreds of millions, and capital ships cost billions. However that's most likely a case of [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale sci-fi fans not having a sense]] of how expensive space ships, space travel, and Amarrian wheat by the metric ton, would be. [[AvertedTrope And the creators do.]] Taking the aversion deeping, ISK is actually a standardized currency with exchange rates against each empire's domestic currency, although this is irrelevant to the players. As underscored by the fact one quest item is a giant pile of unmarked non-sequential bills. As the quest handler points out, it's a lot to them, but it's not even peanuts to someone who deals in ISK.

* Based on RealLife, Literature/JamesBond, when in France at the beginning of ''Literature/OnHerMajestysSecretService'' likes to think of the money in his pocket in old francs because that makes him feel richer, while counting his expenses in new francs to make them seem smaller.

:: Al says "for the stamp" sarcastically, but if he's actually being honest and the cost of a stamp in Sam and Al's "present' time period (the late 1990s) is in the ballpark of $100; that would be a rate of inflation of 40,000% in less than a decade!

* The ''Franchise/AssassinsCreed'' games tend to transpose centuries worth of inflation into the prices you have to pay in the Animus. For example, the first sword you can get in ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedIII'' costs £700 in 1754, which is considerably more money than most people in that time period would see over the course of their entire ''lives'' (£10-15 per year was a fairly good wage for working class people at the time), and still much more than a comparable sword would cost today. Now, if the currency of the game had been the pence rather than the pound, that sword would have cost the far more likely £2 11s 4d, which while still expensive, would not be so outrageously costly that it would be possible for the average person to be able to save up enough to buy one (And for the typical blacksmith to actually be able to find a customer able to afford it).

->'''Young Space Cadet''': Can I borrow a million, billion space credits until next Wednesday?
->'''IQ High''': Sure, just take it out of my wallet.

Second, governments can sometimes simply revalue their currency when the numbers get too unwieldy, by creating "new" dollars or whatever, worth 1,000 or whatever of the old dollars. Except that governments usually leave that to the central banks. This revaluing is usually only for hyperinflation - they don't do much about "normal" inflation. For example, they aren't going to change things so that that newspaper in the 1980s that cost 40 cents and now costs $1.50 costs 40 cents again - ditto that 20-cent bag of candy that now costs about $2. Likely, though, when numbers become ridiculously high for a chocolate bar, new currencies will arise and we'll gradually shift to their use for sake of convenience, with the older currencies likely kept in record (so that they're still valuable).

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
* One of ''Anime/{{Doraemon}}'s'' Gadgets of the Week was a machine that allowed the user to buy things from different time periods (with that period's respective price), by choosing a date and object and inserting the corresponding amount of cash in the machine. Nobita manages to make a profit by buying things cheaply from the past and selling them in the present at an increased price. Unfortunately he decides to celebrate by ordering a bag of candy from the future...
** Another time he used time travel to invest his parent's "secret" money stash, collecting a fantastic amount of interest in the far future...except the stack of bills he gets is in the future currency, so Doraemon has to find a collector to exchange it for modern bills. The result is that he only gets a modest increase (but enough for Nobita to get a bump in his allowance).

[[folder:Comics]]

* Subverted in a Blinky comic strip in ''ComicBook/TheDandy'' where a front cover of the comic in the future (far enough to the point it's now on sale on Jupiter with the characters living in {{Zeerust}}ed homes) and shows it being priced as "still 50p".
** A little HilariousInHindsight, since in RealLife, ''The Dandy'' ceased publication in 2012, at which time it cost £1.99.
* The ''Magazine/{{MAD}}'' spoof of ''Franchise/StarWars'' had Han Solo wondering what he was going to buy with the immense reward he'll get for rescuing Princess Leia. Leia says for that money he can buy a cup of tea on Earth, as "the inflation isn't as bad there."
* In an episode of ''[[ComicBook/TheFabulousFurryFreakBrothers The Freak Brothers]]'' set in the future, an overdue parking bill is in the millions, Phineas tries to pay it with a billion dollar bill from his tiny change purse, but drops the bill which is too small to see.
* In Vol. 5 of ''ComicStrip/PugadBaboy'', the protagonists time-travelled from 1992 to the year 2078. Bab claims 10 million pesos after selling his necklace, which dates to 1970. So when he tried to buy shoes, the shoes cost 8 million pesos.

* Portrayed the other way round in a ''Tim Traveller'' strip in ''Comicbook/TheBeano''. Tim is concerned that his pocket money doesn't go very far, so travels back to the 19th century and is able to buy a baker's entire day's worth of pies and cakes for £1. The baker is astonished, having never seen such riches before.

[[folder:Film]]

** Doc Brown gives Marty $50 to buy a Pepsi with in the year 2015. Similarly, Marty is asked by a charity collector to contribute $100 for the town hall clock, presumably out of pocket change. Contrast this with the 1985 version of the scene, in which Marty gave a solicitor a quarter - a pittance of pocket change even then, and definitely less than a Pepsi would have cost in a restaurant.
** According to [[http://bttf.wikia.com/wiki/Blast_from_the_Past the wiki]], Marty sold his 80s pocket money as antique currency to pay for Gray's Sports Almanac.

* In ''Film/{{Idiocracy}}'', which takes place in the year 2505, everything costs several billion dollars. Of course, the ridiculously bad economy is actually a plot point in the film - it's entirely possible that hideous inflation is an intentional choice rather than just poor economic mismanagement, so that everybody can be rich and amazed to have "billions of dollars".

* In ''Film/IRobot'' this is averted. [[ProductPlacement Beers]] are shown to cost US$48 for ''three'' bottles of beer [[TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture in 2035]] - considering that the cheapest you'd find a bottle of beer in a bar in a major US city in 2012 is $5 and $7-$8 is perfectly reasonable, $16 23 years later sounds very reasonable.

* Inverted in ''Film/{{Cherry 2000}}'', which depicts a [[TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture near-future]] which has undergone massive ''deflation''. For example, mixed drinks in a bar cost 25 cents.
* In the 2000s as imagined in the 1979 film ''Film/{{Americathon}}'', a bum asks for $25 for a cup of coffee (As of 2012, that varies from a little under $2 at a convenience store to almost $4 at some pricier Starbucks if you order a vente).

** In his Literature/Timeline191 -- stories in the CSA that just lost WorldWarOne -- he shows one character complaining about the ridiculous inflation that just started. A beer is now a dime rather than a nickel. Of course showing the economic spiral, the beer prices do go up and up - things start getting really bad when beer gets to a dollar... then ten, then a hundred... It eventually reaches the point where the Hitler Expy says "Bet you a million dollars" during a speech, then takes a million dollar bill out of his pocket and throws it away.
* MarkTwain's ''Literature/AConnecticutYankeeInKingArthursCourt'' [[GenreSavvy anticipates this effect]] when converting 6th-century [[KingArthur Arthurian Britain]] to decimal currency. He defines the units so that a cent is a ''lot'' of money and a dollar an inconceivable fortune, so that prices can inflate to those of 19th-century America on schedule.
* In 1978, in the original version of ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy1'', part of the indication that Ford Prefect really did believe the world was about to end was that he bought six pints, paid with a five-pound note, and told the barman to keep the change. In [[Film/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy the 2005 film]], this became a fifty - £5 wouldn't even ''pay'' for six pints nowadays, let alone leave you with a notable amount of change.

* In Heinlein's ''Literature/CitizenOfTheGalaxy,'' a girl asks the hero, who is in a pensive mood, "Dollar for your thought?" "What?" "Old saying."
** But a million of dollars is still able to buy the services of the premiere lawyer. Though he treats it as a retainer, rather than his full fee.

* The Kingsbury science-fiction short story "To Bring In The Steel" (''Analog'' Magazine, 1978) has the female protagonist stop by [=McDonald=]'s for a quick twenty-five dollar hamburger. (At the time of publication, a 'burger at Mickey D's was about 40¢.)

[[folder:Newspaper Comics]]
* A couple ''ComicStrip/{{Dilbert}}'' comics played with this in the third-word country of Elbonia. One man goes to a grocery store with a chain of bills attached to each other and tells the cashier that the other end of the money chain is being held by his brother in a different town, who will let go when the sale (of a single potato) is completed.
* One ''ComicStrip/{{Garfield}}'' comic from the late 1970s features Jon reading that the rate of inflation is decreasing. Garfield snarks "That and a buck-fifty will get you a cup of coffee."
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Table Top Games]]
* Steve Jackson Game's ''TableTopGame/CarWars'' aka ''Autoduel'', made in the mid 1980s, depicted a MadMax styled post-apocalyptic 2030's of road-going car battles. Most cars are electric, but where gas is available at all it costs about $40 a gallon.
** The supplement ''Chassis and Crossbow'' depicted the even more apocalyptic 2010's, where following a nuclear war and mass collapse of civilization, the trade value of a gallon of alcohol-derivative faux-gas is... about $3 a gallon. Eerie.
* Used and Averted in TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}. A standard lunch costs 40-60$ UCAS dollars. However, in the standard currency of the setting, the Nuyen, that's only 10-15¥.
* Inverted by "classic" TabletopGame/{{Monopoly}} which still uses 1932 prices, with prime oceanfront real estate going for a few hundred dollars.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Television]]

* The ''Magazine/DoctorWhoMagazine'' featured an article in its 400th issue, where a picture of a mock-up 800th issue cover was seen on one of the pages. The price "300 Euros" could be made out on the side.

* Subverted in the episode "The Leap Back" on ''Series/QuantumLeap''. Sam suggests mailing the master code for the imaging chamber (which locked when he and Al cross-leaped), to his father's lawyer with $100 to ensure the man will follow the odd-but-specific instructions about mailing it to Sam on a specific day in the future(the day that Sam is actually ''at'' currently, but trapped in the imaging chamber). Al, who's still out of it from the Leap, suggests Sam is talking about the cost of postage.
-->'''Sam''': The post office. And my dad's lawyer, Doc Krosnov. We mail Doc Krosnov a letter, right? With, say, a hundred bucks.
-->'''Al''': For the stamp.
-->'''Sam''': No, no, no, it's 1945. $100 will do very nicely. We mail him $100 with instructions to [[WriteBackToTheFuture deliver the code on September the 18th, nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine]].

* ''LostInAusten'' inverts this. When the [[FishOutOfTemporalWater modern protagonist]] Amanda truthfully says she lives on £27,000 a year, it gives everyone in the Regency era entirely the wrong idea about how wealthy she is.

-->'''Ichabod''': You did just say she is a billionaire, correct? Meaning she has a billion dollars? That's the gross national income of all 13 colonies, in my lifetime.

* ''VideoGame/DeusEx'' gave us a vision of a "nightmarish" future in which Unleaded is 3.95 a gallon, and Diesel 4.05 (i.e., what gas prices are, approximately, as of 2013)! For reference, the actual price of gas at time of the game's release was about $1.50. Bet 4 bucks a gallon sounded downright nightmarish to them.
** JC's augmentations apparently cost fifty billion dollars (and the same again for Paul), which would probably not be unreasonable if anyone used dollars in Deus Ex's future.
* According to ''VideoGame/SaintsRow2'', gas is about $8.40 per gallon. This is lampshading the minor gas crisis that was occurring during the game's development, when gas was raising about 40 cents per month (coming to a head of about $4.50 a gallon in some states.)

* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 1}}'' had a gas station where the price of regular gasoline was somewhere in the $4500 range. Premium fuel was [[AndNinetyNineCents $8000.99]] per gallon. (Then again, this may have been more due to the lack of oil. The shock of the price is still jarring to those who do not know about the oil shortage of the past)
** The intro to ''Fallout 1'' also shows an ad for a car advertised as being fully analog, with no computers, and costing "just" $199,999.99.
** The newspapers from the 2050s and 2070s shown in the ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 3}}'' loading screens cost $56 each.
** Bottle caps, the standard currency of the Wasteland in most of the games, excepting ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 2}}'' where they've been temporarily displaced by NCR gold dollars, are backed by the cost of water, in a radioactive desert, by most merchants. So needless to say they're worth quite a bit more than modern dollars. Though a stack of pre-war currency (presumably $100) usually goes for about 10 caps, as a collectible.
** In ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 4}}'', as evidenced by a terminal in Gwinnett Brewery, a pint of beer cost ''$39'' in 2077, the year the [[WorldWarIII Great War]] started. A six-pack cost $200, and a donut is proudly advertised for [[SarcasmMode the low low price]] of $30.

* Might seem to be the case in ''EVEOnline'' as the simplest of commodities cost hundreds of thousands ISK to millions, high-end ships cost hundreds of millions, and capital ships cost billions. However that's most likely a case of [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale sci-fi fans not having a sense]] of how expensive space ships, space travel, and Amarrian wheat by the metric ton, would be. [[AvertedTrope And the creators do.]]
** Taking the aversion deeping, ISK is actually a standardized currency with exchange rates against each empire's domestic currency, although this is irrelevant to the players. As underscored by the fact one quest item is a giant pile of unmarked non-sequential bills. As the quest handler points out, it's a lot to them, but it's not even peanuts to someone who deals in ISK.
* In the alternate future in ''{{Homefront}}'', gas prices rise to $19.99 per gallon. Yikes. [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6NiAGu4_8s Here is the trailer where it's mentioned]]. The exact time is around 0:53.
* In ''GeminiRue'', you can find an advertisement for a menial labor job in the mines. It pays $2400 per hour.

[[folder:Webcomics]]
* ''Webcomic/TwentyFirstCenturyFox'' (takes place in 2066) plays it straight, but the inflation doesn't get much mention, besides a couple of comics near the beginning, where gas is "cheap" for $70 a gallon, and a can of soda is 20 dollars - and the main characters just happen to have a couple of $20 coins on them.

-->"That comes up to [[http://flakypastry.runningwithpencils.com/comic.php?strip_id=276 fifty trillion two hundred sixteen thousand nine hundred forty three]] [[AndNinetyNineCents and fifty cents]].

** And Website/GaiaOnline has passed postwar Germany's inflation to be comparable to Zimbabwe's.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'' averts this - with Fry's $4 billion in his account (saved over 1000 years, of course) is enough to make him independently wealthy, and getting a $300 tax rebate is a big deal. Of course, it's shown in the first episode that society has collapsed and been rebuilt several times since Fry put that money into his account, so it is possible that somewhere along the way, the government corrected for any inflation. In fact, considering the sheer amount of bizarre history that's occurred over 1000 years, including [[AmericaTakesOverTheWorld America taking over the world]], it's amazing Fry's money is any good at all.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons''
** One episode had a parody of the (then) modern Russian economy with an instance of Ridiculous ''Present'' Inflation, with a Russian dignitary at the Olympics committee:
-->'''Russian:''' Come to Russia, where 1 dollar worth 5 roubles. [gets paged on his beeper, and reads out the message, sounding increasingly panicked] 12 roubles. ''50 roubles''. '''''1000 ROUBLES!?''''' ''I must go''. [Frantically leaves the conference hall.]

** Also an inversion: in an episode set in the ''HuckleberryFinn'' era, Tom and Huck are shocked that a couple days worth of supplies cost 2 cents and there was a 99-cent store which sold such items as grand pianos.

* Less well-known than the German hyperinflation, the worst inflation yet happened in Hungary in the wake of WorldWarII. When the pengő currency was replaced by the forint on 1st August 1946, the conversion rate was 4 x 10[[superscript:29]] (a 4 followed by ''29'' zeros) pengő to a single forint.
** To give you an idea of just ''how'' ridiculous this number is: if you could buy ''one atom'' of hydrogen for one pengő -- just one atom -- you [[HiroshimaAsAUnitOfMeasure could fill ]] UsefulNotes/TheHindenburg for twenty-five forints. (And, at 2010 exchange rates, that would run you a little over 12¢ US, less than a tenth of a euro.)
* Happened in the modern times in Zimbabwe where the exchange rate at late June, 2008 was 20 billion $Z to 1 $US. In 2007 the inflation rate was going up so fast that golfers would prepay for their drinks before starting their round because the price would have gone up significantly by the time they finished the 18th hole, and that waiting a day to buy bread meant you could no longer afford to do so.
** The economy is right now pretty much running on foreign currency: the Zimbabwean dollar is so worthless that it's actually more cost effective to sell the currency for use as recycled paper (and get paid in real money) than it is to use it for its face value. A Zimbabwean newspaper printed its ads on Zimbabwean money...
** [[HumiliationConga Zimbabwean government banned]] ''its own'' currency in April 2009. In June 2015, Zimbabwe officially abandoned its currency, choosing instead to use the US Dollar.
** Before then the inflation was exponential... on a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ZWDvUSDchart.png logarithmic graph]]

[[quoteright:238:[[UsefulNotes/{{Zimbabwe}} http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Hundred_billion_dollars_and_eggs.jpg]]]]
[[caption-width-right:238:[[TruthInTelevision Zimbabwe's $100 billion banknote with the amount of goods it could purchase on its release date.]]]]

* The ''Magazine/{{MAD}}'' spoof of ''StarWars'' had Han Solo wondering what he was going to buy with the immense reward he'll get for rescuing Princess Leia. Leia says for that money he can buy a cup of tea on Earth, as "the inflation isn't as bad there."

* Averted in ''TheWitcher'', where one character mentions that whenever a party of adventurers tries to slay a dragon, there's always some magician nearby, and said magician ''always'' has connections to the Goldsmiths and Jewelers Guild or some large bank. Indeed, [[SarcasmMode no one has ever heard of inflation in their world]].
* Subverted in the TimeWarpTrio book ''2095''. In said year, a slice of pizza costs something like $150, but ''antigravity devices'' are a buck apiece. Which might have something to do with said AG disks being powered by MSG.

* TimeWarpTrio has 100 dollar bills as something you borrow from a (school aged) friend for gum in the year 2105.

* In an episode of ''SamuraiJack'', a bounty hunter says that Aku has a bounty on Jack's head worth two googolplex. Yes, the hunter is convinced that this is "a ''looooot'' of money" and the person offering the bounty controls the entire world, but [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googolplex that's]] just ''ridiculous''.[[note]]One Googol has a hundred zeroes, One Googolplex has a Googol zeroes[[/note]].

* ''TheSimpsons''

* A couple ''ComicStrip/{{Dilbert}}'' comics played with this in the third-word country of Elbonia. One man goes to a grocery store with a chain of bills attached to each other and tells the cashier that the other end of the money chain is being held by his brother in a different town, who will let go when the sale (Of a single potato) is completed.

** In his {{Timeline-191}} -- stories in the CSA that just lost WorldWarOne -- he shows one character complaining about the ridiculous inflation that just started. A beer is now a dime rather than a nickel. Of course showing the economic spiral, the beer prices do go up and up - things start getting really bad when beer gets to a dollar... then ten, then a hundred... It eventually reaches the point where the Hitler Expy says "Bet you a million dollars" during a speech, then takes a million dollar bill out of his pocket and throws it away.

* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 1}}'' had a gas station where the price of regular gasoline was somewhere in the $4500 range. Premium fuel was $8000.99 per gallon. (Then again, this may have been more due to the lack of oil. The shock of the price is still jarring to those who do not know about the oil shortage of the past)

* In ''VideoGame/{{Fallout 4}}'', as evidenced by a terminal in Gwinnett Brewery, a pint of beer cost ''$39'' in 2077, the year the [[WorldWarIII Great War]] started. A six-pack cost $200, and a donut is proudly advertised for [[SarcasmMode the low low price]] of $30.

* In a Filipino comic strip, were the protagonists entered in the year 2078, one of them claimed 10 million pesos after selling his necklace that dated during the 1970s. So when he tried to buy shoes, the shoes cost 8 million pesos.

* In the ''[[InNameOnly I, Robot]]'' movie this is mostly averted. [[ProductPlacement Beers]] are shown to cost US$48 for ''three'' bottles of beer [[TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture in 2035]] - considering that the cheapest you'd find a bottle of beer in a bar in a major US city in 2012 is $5 and $7-$8 is perfectly reasonable, $16 23 years later sounds very reasonable.

* ''Webcomic/QuantumVibe'': Used as an AuthorTract [[http://www.quantumvibe.com/strip?page=228 against fiat currency]]

* In Venezuela it reached the point where one American dollar was Bs.5,000. They fixed it though; now with the "Strong" Bolivars, the conversion rate is about 6 Bolivars to the dollar -- but only if you go thorough the Officially sanctioned way to get them (the black market dollar has a rate at least 8 times that and increasing daily).
** It's more than ten times that, now. It's gotten so bad that someone made a joke about it: Man walks into a brothel, whispers something to one of the women, and gets slapped. He approaches another, and gets a drink thrown on his face. A third spits on him. The owner, a well-experienced woman who thinks she's SeenItAll so whatever he's saying can't possibly shock her walks up to the man and asks him what he's been telling all her girls. His response: "I want to know if I can pay in Venezuelan Bolivars."