1000000000 Pengő Political propaganda

Hungary's post-war inflation remains the most severe ever recorded. By mid-1946, prices were doubling roughly every fifteen hours, and the Magyar Nemzeti Bank was forced into an increasingly absurd cycle of issuing higher and higher denominations. The one billion pengő note was among the last printed before the forint was introduced on 1 August 1946, at a conversion rate that effectively rendered the entire pengő series worthless overnight — one forint equaled 400,000 quadrillion pengő.

The "political propaganda" designation reflects overprints added during this period, when notes were sometimes stamped with slogans or electoral messaging ahead of the 1947 elections. Printed domestically rather than abroad, given that wartime destruction of Hungary's industrial capacity had ironically left the currency presses among the few functioning institutions in the country.