Could An Ounce Of Gold Be Worth Trillions One Day?

In a reallybizarre moment in history, a single American dollar was actually worth 4.2trillion German marks.

It really happened. To fund its mega-expensive World War Ieffort, Germany severed the tie between its mark and gold -- somethingthat's always happened, sooner or later, with government-generated currency.

Today there are no gold-backed currencies in the world.

After 1914in Germany, the mark became just another fancy piece of worthlesspaper. No longer tied to gold, there were no longer any limitations onhow many marks could be printed. But no worries, either -- the patrioticGerman populace somehow believed everything would work out fine as longas Germany won the war. Because the winners of wars, everybody knew,always dictated the terms of surrender, including -- and especially -- theeconomic terms.

The trouble was:

GERMANY LOST THE WAR

Bythe end of the war in 1918, Germany was a real mess. The Treaty ofVersailles imposed steep war reparations, and that did nothing tostrengthen a German Reichmark no longer backed by gold or anythingelse for that matter.

Confidence in the mark continued tonosedive, especially under a deluge of post-war government spending inmany new social programs (sound familiar?). But Germany couldn't spendits way back to normal -- no country can pull that off -- and confidence in thepost-war currency continued to plummet.

By 1922, just four years after the war, Germany's inflation pest had turned into a gigantic hyperinflation monster.

It was like a dog chasing its tail. The faster the government printed money, the faster business raisedits prices. Round and round the whole thing went, never quite catching itself.

After the war, just one of our gold-backed dollars was worth -- readyfor this? -- 4.2 trillion marks. That's right...a 1-to-4.2 trillionexchange rate existed between our currencies.

Even our lowly copper penny was worth 42 billion marks. Yikes.

Think a $1,000 bill is a lot? Try carrying around a 100 trillion-mark bill. Germans had to carry those kinds of comical bills around just to buy everyday things.

Denial was huge back then. One professor even wrote, "In proportion to the need, less money circulatesin Germany now than before the war." That was said straight-faced,despite an official inflation rate of about 325,000,000%.

People eating at restaurants would watch the prices of the food theywere eating rise even as they ate. One maid was tipped a dollar by avisiting American...then met with her family to figure out how to investthis relative fortune.

"The ones who fared best were the smallminority who had the foresight to exchange marks into foreign money orgold very early," reported Scientific Market Analysis.

Could ouronce-mighty dollar suffer the hyperinflation humiliation of the Germanmark?

Could an ounce of gold be worth millions, billions, even trillionsin world currencies someday soon?

Could gold be the last money standing?