If Premier Ferenc Nagy and his fellow Cabinet members had paid their return trip from New York to London in Hungarian currency, it would have cost them 14,250,000,000,000,000 pengös apiece.*In Hungary's abysmal inflation the worst in modern historyone U.S. dollar last week bought 38 trillion pengös. Bookkeepers used a new word: "Mil-pengö" (one million pengös), because their figures no longer fitted the ledgers.
Some 4% of Budapest's citizens live in morbid, black-market-borne luxury, nightly jam the few remaining big hotels, famed restaurants like Gundel's or the Cafe Michel, theaters, cabarets and movie houses. For the rest of the people,...
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