Have you ever read "When Money Dies"?

The thing that stayed in my head was that the country was full of superficially-wealthy people in nice houses with pianos and paintings, but they had no liquid assets beyond German marks and government bonds, so they tried to sell pianos for potatoes. 

 The craziest thing in that book was when folk started slaughtering farm animals thinking farmers were to blame 

 Yeah. And there was a lot of craziness, in that book.