History Main / RidiculousExchangeRates

* The French franc would have similar issues through the first half of the 20th century, with the exchange rate reaching 980 francs to the British pound by 1949. Revaluation in 1960 would reduce the imbalance, with one new franc equalling 100 old francs.

* UsefulNotes/{{Venezuela}} is a by-word for hyperinflation, especially among [[RedScare Communist-hating Americans]] who see it as a textbook example of what happens when you go [[YouKeepUsingThatWord Communist]] (or more accurately, when [[UsefulNotes/{{Socialism}} self-proclaimed Socialists]] try to regulate a market through wishful thinking, combined with [[CripplingOverspecialization an economy based almost entirely on oil exports]], while failing to invest in maintaining oil production facilities). It started with president UsefulNotes/HugoChavez and continued under his successor Nicolás Maduro — neither saw a need to let the global market decide their currency's value, and the bolivar was worth whatever they said it was worth. They didn't take the black market into account — ignoring the market won't make it go away, it just pushes it off the books. By 2016, inflation was around 700% — by July 2018, Maduro's opposition was claiming it was over ''80,000%'' per year, and the black market exchange rate was six million new bolivars (or six ''billion'' pre-2008 bolivars) per U.S. dollar. A further redenomination took place in 2018, with one bolivar soberano (sovereign bolivar) equaling 100,000 bolivares fuertes. The country's famously antagonistic relationship with the U.S. has led it to abandon any outside help, and the extreme corruption, currency controls, and disparity between official and unofficial exchange rates has led to government and police getting ''very'' rich at the expense of people who can't afford basic necessities. Maduro tried to solve this problem by proposing the "petro", essentially a petroleum-backed currency pegged at 60 U.S. dollars per "petro", then nominally pegging the sovereign bolivar at the rate of 1 petro to 3600 sovereign bolivars. This didn't work.

** {{Subverted}} (against all logic) by UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco "Emperor" [[CloudCuckoolander Joshua]] [[CrazyAwesome Norton]] I, who printed scrip or bonds in the 1870s and used them to pay for things — successfully, as he was a cult figure in the city, and businesses liked to show that they had his "Imperial" approval. Local businesses accepted them at fifty cents' face value, and when the time came for Norton to pay up, he printed even more scrip and used that instead. It still worked. When he died, all the scrip instantly became worthless; however, ''nowadays'' surviving Norton scrip can be worth tens of thousands of dollars as collectibles.

See also RidiculousFutureInflation. Not to be confused with money printed via [[CounterfeitCash counterfeiting]], which is sometimes referred to as "funny money".

* Cryptocurrency, such as {{UsefulNotes/Bitcoin}}, if you were to treat it like normal currency, can carry ridiculous exchange rates. For example, 1 Bitcoin can be traded in for upwards of $30,000 USD if not more as of Jan 2021. Others still carry 3 or even 4 digit exchange rates.
** On the other hand, most cryptocurrencies can be divided into much smaller pieces than traditional currencies. For example, there are one hundred ''million'' "satoshis" in each Bitcoin, compared to one hundred cents in each dollar. So when Bitcoins are going for $30,000 each, it still takes 33 satoshis to equal a single penny.

** One Creator/DonRosa DonaldDuck story featured a wanted poster citing a reward of "one [[EleventyZillion bajillion]] pecos ($20)".

* One Creator/DonRosa DonaldDuck story featured a wanted poster citing a reward of "one [[EleventyZillion bajillion]] pecos ($20)".

* In ''Film/CanadianBacon'', Bud (John Candy) and co. get pulled over for driving a truck covered in [[CompletelyMissingThePoint Canadian insult graffiti]] written in English, but not ''French''. The fine is $1,000 Canadian, or $10 American... [[DoWrongRight and they have to add the French translations to the truck]].

It's all TruthInTelevision, and it's generally called "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation hyperinflation]]". It usually happens with a poor country with a [[UsefulNotes/{{Economics}} tenuous grasp of economics]] tries to alleviate the poverty problem by printing more money. In the very very short term, it might help, but it usually makes the problem much, much worse. If you think of hard currency as a giant pie, printing more money doesn't grow the pie; it just makes the slices smaller. A currency doesn't have a certain value just because you say it does, even if you peg the exchange rate; its value is based on what you can get in exchange (in the old days gold, in modern times a "reserve currency" — ''i.e.'' a big stable currency like the U.S. dollar or the euro), and if the people have little to no faith in the government, they're not going to put a very high value on the currency.[[note]]As an aside, a fixed exchange rate won't solve the problem of people having no faith in the currency, especially now that they can get a currency they can ''really'' trust — like the U.S. dollar — at a great rate. At some point, the government is going to run out of U.S. dollars to hand out to people in exchange for the local currency, and it has to either procure new dollars by selling stuff (not easy for a poor country) or devalue the local currency. Economists call this the "liquidity trap".[[/note]] Some of the examples of hyperinflation can get extreme just by the collapse in the faith in the currency and the government.

* In the last issue of ''[[ComicBook/ArchieComicsSonicTheHedgehog Sonic Universe]]'', the Chaotix Detective Agency receives a large reward of Meropan Sand Dollars for successfully solving a case. To their dismay, Meropan Sand Dollars are [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_dollar sand dollar exoskeletons]], and have such a miserable exchange rate that the reward is effectively worthless.

* In ''Webcomic/AxisPowersHetalia'', Germany is in ''a lot'' of debt to France and all his money is worthless. So Germany gets [[TheDitz 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.

* In [[http://danbooru.donmai.us/pool/show/718 this]] ''VideoGame/{{Touhou}}'' {{doujin}} [[{{Yonkoma}} 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 [[OhCrap Reimu going on the warpath]].[[/folder]]

* The French franc would have similar issues through the first half of the 20th century, with the exchange rate reaching 980 francs to the British pound by 1949. Revaluation in 1960 would reduce the imbalance.

* The UsefulNotes/{{Canad|a}}ian dollar is often ''thought'' of by Americans as "funny money", but again, this has more to do with the country's ButtMonkey neighbor status among Americans than anything else. The Canadian dollar has never fallen below about 0.61 U.S. dollars, and on a few rare occasions has been even ''stronger'' than the U.S. dollar. (Fluctuations are the result of things like global oil price changes.) For much of the late 2000s and early 2010s, the U.S. and Canadian dollars were within just a few cents of each other in value. But its pretty colours, evocative names (the "loonie" and "toonie"), and general lack of usefulness outside of Canada fit it in with the general [[CanadaEh "Canada is weird"]] aesthetic in the States. The main issue with the Canadian dollar is that entities that do a lot of business in the U.S. tend to get a lot of U.S. dollars and are thus more exposed to currency risk — Canadians [[CanadianEqualsHockeyFan mostly care]] that this discrepancy forced two UsefulNotes/{{NHL}} teams to move from Canada to the U.S. in TheNineties, and [[SeriousBusiness they still haven't forgiven the Yanks]] for that (even after they got one ''back'').

-> '''Bank worker''': Converted to USA currency, that would be 27$.
-> '''Girl''': Damn! And I brought that bastard breakfast to bed, too.

* In the last issue of ''[[ComicBook/ArchieComicsSonicTheHedgehog Sonic Universe]]'', the Chaotix Detective Agency receives a large reward of Meropan Sand Dollars for successfully solving a case. As they eventually find out, though, Meropan Sand Dollars have such a miserable exchange rate that the reward is effectively worthless.

** {{Subverted}} (against all logic) by UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco "Emperor" [[CloudCuckoolanderJoshua]] [[CrazyAwesome Norton]] I, who printed scrip or bonds in the 1870s and used them to pay for things — successfully, as he was a cult figure in the city, and businesses liked to show that they had his "Imperial" approval. Local businesses accepted them at fifty cents' face value, and when the time came for Norton to pay up, he printed even more scrip and used that instead. It still worked. When he died, all the scrip instantly became worthless; however, ''nowadays'' surviving Norton scrip can be worth tens of thousands of dollars as collectibles.

** During UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar, Confederate paper money was notoriously worthless (although now some rare bills might be valuable collector's items). The Union tried printing counterfeit bills to undermine the Confederate dollar, but success was hard to gauge — even though they were [[ShoddyKnockoffProduct poor and cheap fakes]], nobody valued them any less than the real thing. The counterfeit bills are sometimes even more valuable as collector's items than the real bills (and they also don't run afoul of U.S. law prohibiting ownership of counterfeit currency, since even real Confederate money isn't legal tender[[note]]Creating ''modern'' counterfeit Confederate money and trying to pass it off as the real thing would still be considered fraud, though.[[/note]]). The Confederacy didn't last long enough to make its own coins to go with the paper money (though a silver half-dollar and a one cent coin were designed and had a handful of prototypes struck), instead just using U.S. dollar coins, since the Confederate dollar was ''meant'' to have the same value as the U.S. dollar.

** {{Subverted}} (against all logic) by UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco "Emperor" Joshua Norton I, who printed scrip or bonds in the 1870s and used them to pay for things — successfully, as he was a cult figure in the city. Local businesses accepted them at fifty cents' face value, and when the time came for Norton to pay up, he printed even more scrip and used that instead. It still worked. When he died, all the scrip instantly became worthless; however, ''nowadays'' surviving Norton scrip can be worth tens of thousands of dollars as collectibles.

* UsefulNotes/{{Venezuela}} is a by-word for hyperinflation, especially among [[RedScare Communist-hating Americans]] who see it as a textbook example of what happens when you go Communist (or more accurately, when you try to regulate a market through wishful thinking). It started with president UsefulNotes/HugoChavez and continued under his successor Nicolás Maduro — neither saw a need to let the global market decide their currency's value, and the bolivar was worth whatever they said it was worth. They didn't take the black market into account — ignoring the market won't make it go away, it just pushes it off the books. By 2016, inflation was around 700% — by July 2018, Maduro's opposition was claiming it was over ''80,000%'' per year, and the black market exchange rate was six million new bolivars (or six ''billion'' pre-2008 bolivars) per U.S. dollar. A further redenomination took place in 2018, with one bolivar soberano (sovereign bolivar) equalling 100,000 bolivares fuertes. The country's famously antagonistic relationship with the U.S. has led it to abandon any outside help, and the extreme corruption, currency controls, and disparity between official and unofficial exchange rates has led to government and police getting ''very'' rich at the expense of people who can't afford basic necessities. Maduro tried to solve this problem by proposing the "petro", essentially a petroleum-backed currency pegged at 60 U.S. dollars per "petro", then nominally pegging the sovereign bolivar at the rate of 1 petro to 3600 sovereign bolivars. This didn't work.

* ''VideoGame/{{Neopets}}'' has serious issues with hyperinflation, caused by the fact winning Neopets is a walk in the park, although the stakk introduced policies aiming to reduce this amount, such as the selling of an item by a NPC account (read [[http://www.themarysue.com/neopets-economy/ here]] for more details).

* In the late 1980s and early 1990s, UsefulNotes/{{Poland}} was just getting used to the whole "market economy" thing, and the value of the Polish zloty fell so badly that before the redenomination in 1995, the largest bill in circulation (introduced in 1992) was was "only" [[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tsrhPoQ27C0/TeEUiXWnxAI/AAAAAAAAO0E/eEHdUhofyLo/s1600/banknoty_stare_pl_2000000z%25C5%2582.jpg two million zlotys]], roughly 80 U.S. dollars at the time. The new zloty was established by dropping four zeroes from the old zloty.

* ''Film/StreetFighter'': 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). Each Bison Dollar shall be worth 5 British Pounds. For that is the exchange rate the Bank of England will set once he kidnaps their queen! Which is not how currency exchange rates are determined at all. Not even close. But then, that's the joke.[[note]]Economically speaking, that would be the equivalent of blackmailing the Bank of England into printing more pounds directly into Bison's pocket. Which would of course cause inflation, to a degree depending on how greedy Bison was. That is, assuming the Bank of England would even agree or that Bison would even be successful at his plan in the first place, which forms another part of the joke; he's so insane he's incredibly confident the plan will work.[[/note]]

** In "The Old Man and the C Student", 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!''

* ''WesternAnimation/RobotChicken'' spoofed Series/TheSixMillionDollarMan with the Six Million Peso Man (who upon being completed immediately disappears past the US border).

* Solaris VII, [[BloodSport The Game World]] of ''TabletopGame/BattleTech'' is one of the few planets explicitly mentioned to print its own money. However, due to the proliferation of H-bills and the [[GlobalCurrency universally accepted]] C-Bill, Solaris scrip is only good on Solaris, and while it has some value for betting, there are a few snide references to the fact that to be worth anything, Solaris scrip must be spent in fairly large numbers and that as singles they might as well be given away. It's so bad that the local's nicknamed the scrip "Teep", from "T.P", [[ToiletHumor the only thing Solaris VII residents think it's good for.]] Oddly enough, no explicit exchange rates have ever been canonized, only the aforementioned implications. Most House currencies have much more favorable [[http://www.sarna.net/wiki/C-Bill#Value exchange rates]].