Pengoes, Garas

Hungarians popped into their purses last week crisp new banknotes denominated in pengoes and garas.

"How much is a pengoe?" piped many a tot.

Harassed Hungarian mothers explained: "One hundred garas make a pengoe. Now see! Here are 1250 korona. . . . They also make one pengoe or one hundred garas. . . .

From now on we shall buy things with pengoes instead of korona."

Five Trillions. Whirring, chomping post-War money presses inflated the Hungarian banknote circulation to a stupendous total: five trillion korona. Peasants with a comfortable pre-War nest egg of 14,000 paper korona ($2,800) discovered that they possessed the equivalent of about $20 when the korona was at last stabilized by the able U. S. fiscal administrator of Hungary, Jeremiah Smith (TIME, July 5 et ante).

Since Hungarians have found it inconvenient to keep household accounts in multiples of 1,000 korona and business accounts in multiples of 100,000, the pengoe was created to strike out redundant zeros by a law of Nov. 4, 1925 which went into effect last week.