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Message:: [QUOTE="Quant.Geek, post: 8300824, member: 74799"]As a financial engineer, there is a tendency for me to smile about the CPI and how it affects the purchasing power.  While I do not have a concrete coin example to show, I do have something interesting that is somewhat related.  During the American Revolutionary War, the state of Massachusetts was suffering from high inflation. This affected the war effort as the payment to soldiers were getting deprecated extremely fast. By 1779-1780, the morale in the army was extremely low. The British captured Georgia and Charleston in South Carolina. Furthermore, the British Navy enacted a blockade in Northeastern United States. In fact, there were several mutinies in 1780 and 1781. To combat this, Massachusetts invented the world's first inflation-linked bond to help compensate solider's for their pay's loss of value. A synthetic index was created using the most common goods and the interest and principal was pegged against it.  In finance, some of the most ingenious inventions were done by anonymous individuals, and this is an example of it. Behold, a soldier's compensation bond that is in my collection. This was issued to Josiah Willington who was involved in several of the infamous campaigns during the war... The index is based on: Five bushels of corn, sixty-eight pounds and four-seventh parts of beef, ten pounds of sheep wool, and sixteen pounds of sole leather [ATTACH=full]1468481[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]