20 000 Pesos Bolivianos

Bolivia's inflation crisis of the early 1980s was among the worst in recorded history — by 1985, annual inflation had exceeded 20,000 percent, and the peso boliviano was being replaced by denominations that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. This 20,000-note was not an outlier; it was a routine transactional instrument in a system rapidly losing coherence.

Jeffries Banknote Company, a Los Angeles firm that handled work for several Latin American central banks during this period, printed the series. Bolivia's reliance on foreign printers for emergency high-denomination issues was partly logistical — domestic capacity could not keep pace with demand. The peso boliviano series was eventually abandoned entirely in 1987 with the introduction of the boliviano at a conversion rate of one million to one.