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Stories about the rigors of life in Germany are plentiful.  Economic disaster ensued when the Allied Reparation Commission required Germany to pay a whopping 132 billion gold marks in reparations for World War 1 — Janet Klug, Linn’s Stamp News, 25 February 2008.

Whopping?  132 billion gold marks sounds like a lot, but so does 132 billion Turkish “old” Lira.  This is an example of the type of  information searches philately spurs:

What’s was the buying power of 132 billion gold marks in 1921?  A thousand homes?  The Louvre?  All of Liechtenstein?

Let’s start with a Google search for germany inflation 1923 wikipedia and look at the first match:

The total reparations demanded was 132,000,000,000 gold marks which was far more than the total German gold or foreign exchange.  An attempt was made by Germany to buy foreign exchange, but that was paid in treasury bills and commercial debts for Marks which only increased the speed of devaluation.

Um, OK.  You bill the country more than its entire net worth?  Had no idea.  Yikes.  The article also states:

The German currency was relatively stable at about 60 Marks per US Dollar during the first half of 1921.

Have I mentioned I love Google?  People were talking about the “Information Age” decades ago, but Google has gotta define it.  Anyway, a search for dollar historical buying power in Google, and, again, the first match: Historical Currency Conversions.  A little division, and we put “2 billion 200 million” into the form, and choose “dollars” (yes, you can spell out your amounts like that.)  The answer: 4.7 x 10¹⁸ (4.7E18) dollars in today’s buying power!

This post will be useful for students, so I will avoid profanity at this moment.  But, man!  That’s almost 5 sextillion dollars!  The U.S. GDP (thanks, Google!) was 13 trillion in 2006.  That’s 350,000 years’ worth of the U.S. economy!

Someone please tell me I made a decimal point error somewhere, or that the people at Historical Currency Conversions are full of it.  Sextillions of dollars?

Forget Liechtenstein!  There’s not a continent you couldn’t buy for that kind of money!

What were “we” thinking?  Did we really think this wouldn’t trigger another, worse war?