Most people
have no idea how quickly this can happen
here. I saw it
first hand in France in the late 1950's, when $50 U.S. dollars bought so much in
paper French francs that they would not
fit into a deep briefcase. This series
of pictures of what has happened in Zimbabwe shows what happens when it's
actually cheaper to use paper money for toilet paper than to buy toilet paper
with it.
Zimbabwe's hyper-inflation problem is not
new, but the pictures illustrate a lot more than what you can read from
Bloomberg...
ZIMBABWE. PUTTING THINGS IN
PERSPECTIVE!
One 200,000 dollar note is worth less
than $0.10 cents.
December 22nd, 2008 a new note of 500,000
dollars is introduced to the market!
Next - 750,000
dollars.
January 2009 - new note of 10 million
dollars.
This U.S. $10 dollar Note
[as of March 14, A. D. 2009] is worth 10 times more than
the 10 million dollar Zimbabwe note.
A case worth 65 billion Zimbabwe dollars which equals $2000 US dollars.
This guy is going to a supermarket. The exchange rate is 25 million Zimbabwe dollars for 1 U.S. dollar.
This mountain of cash is worth $100 USD.
50 Million note is then
introduced!
Next is the 250 million dollar
note!
Sorry, how much is this t-shirt? - It's cheap, only about 3 billion dollars!
May 2008 - a note of 500 million dollars is
introduced!
June 2008 - notes worth
25 and 50 billion are printed.
And finally - 100 billion dollar note!
What can you buy for it? Well, these 3 eggs for example.
This is how people pay in
restaurants!
And the restaurant bills
In August 2008, the government revalued the Zimbabwe dollar by
removing 10 zeros from notes.
However, inflation kept going up and
in September 2008 for this amount of cash you could only buy 4
tomatoes.
And for this - some bread.
And then it started again: 20,000 dollar note in September
2008.
50,000 a couple of weeks ago!
The 500,000 and 1,000,000 (new currency)
notes have just been released.
The country's currency plunged to a new record low on Monday,
trading at an average Z$28.4 quadrillion to the U.S. dollar and triggering
massive price increases.
The
hyperinflation is now estimated at over a quintillion percent, although no one
really knows.
All of
which explains the attached picture of a toilet.
