It is inflation by definition, and there is little that can be done about it.
However, one local has become fascinated by the creeping premiums, and wished to recount his own experience on the autonomous rise in costs in recent history.
Born a stone’s throw from Cobram in 1928, the man, who wishes to remain anonymous, remembers what a standard wage looked like as a youngster — and it is a far cry from what any working professional would expect in their pay packet today.
“When I was a kid back in the 1930s, my father employed two or three blokes and they earned £1 a week,” he said.
“A few years later I worked for Dad when attending Dookie College, earning about £20 a week.”
While this weekly sum is below today's average hourly rate, the local just happens to have held on to a relic from the past which details the erosion of value in currency in its most iconic form — hyperinflation.
What is even more remarkable is that this man has a book which illustrates possibly the most famous example of a currency crash ever — the incredible drop in value of the German Papiermark (or mark) during the Weimar Republic in the early 1920s.
And it guarantees to send jaws dropping.
So, what exactly is in this book, where hyperinflation is measured and can be touched on a century later?
Stamps.
Passed down to the man from his mother, the pages of the book are littered with stamps in shades of fuchsia, emerald, scarlet and royal blue.
But the colours are not what is important, rather the denominations depicted on the little paper squares.
Heading the top of page one: three marks for a stamp. Scroll down a little further, the cost jumps to five marks, then 10, 20, 50 marks — admittedly, nothing too out of the ordinary.
However, turn one page over, and this is where the madness begins.
In a matter of months, those same stamps which cost less than 10 marks galloped up to one million, then 10 million, then 50 million marks.
Ridiculously, these unfathomable prices just kept on soaring.
“I remember my mum telling me to be able to buy a loaf of bread they’d have to take a wheelbarrow full of money,” he said.
The man wasn’t joking, nor was his mother stretching the truth.
It has been documented a loaf of bread in Berlin that cost around 160 Marks at the end of 1922 cost 200,000,000,000 marks by late 1923.
For clarification, that’s 200 billion.
Notes of currency reached staggering figures of up to 500 trillion before stabilisation occurred, where the ‘Rentenmark’, or ‘mortgage mark’, was introduced.
Which, as it happens, also line the sepia-toned pages of the man’s book.
Here, the madness of depreciation was offset by the method of revaluation, which is indicated by a total reset as the million-mark stamps were swapped out for a refined form of legal tender.
Those numbers on the stamps of fuchsia, emerald, scarlet and royal blue scaled right back down to single digits, signalling the end of internal political instability in post-war Germany.
And amazingly, this is all documented in a stamp book in the Moira Shire nearly 100 years later.
Who says money doesn’t make the world go around?
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