Imagine yourself among the wealthiest people in the world in 1914, holding 4.2 billion marks (then about $1 billion) in safe government bonds. Those bonds would have been nearly worthless 9 years later -- easily payable with, say, a 50 billion-mark banknote signed by Reichsbank President Rudolf Havenstein. Of course, you would need 45.8 billion marks in change, which illustrates one of the great ironies of hyperinflation: Everyone was always short of cash in the midst of a blizzard of paper.