See Zimbabwe 100 Trillion Dollar note that cannot buy Bread

Zimbabwe used to have a Z$100,000,000,000,000 note - one trillion Zimbabwean dollars.

The note, along with previous hyper-inflated denominations including Z$10,000,000,000,000 (ten trillion) and Z$1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion), could be exchanged for U.S. dollars until the end of April 2016, but it was worth only about $0.40. It is fetching significant higher prices as a novelty item on websites such as eBay.

When inflation hit 230,000,000 percent in 2009 , the country's reserve bank -- infamous for its inability to contain sky-high hyperinflation -- declared the U.S. dollar as its official currency.

From excessively high inflation to -2.3% deflation, Mangudya remembers the tough years vividly. "It was so traumatizing," he admitted. "We didn't have the tools to fight the monster that the economy was facing at the time."

The country had to keep printing money. Prices would change by the minute, causing stress revolving around the fluctuations, one of the devastating effects of hyperinflation.

"It was terrible. You'd have to pay for your coffee before you drank it because if you waited the cost would rise within minutes," said businessman Shingi Minyeza, chairman of Vinal Investments

The disappearing currency

When the Zimbabwean dollar first came into existence in 1980 it had a similar value to the US dollar, writes Patrick Collinson. But by 2009, $1 was worth Z$2,621,984,228, 675,650,147,435,579,309,984,228. The Bank of England worries if inflation in the UK goes over 2% a year; in Zimbabwe it hit 79.6 billion per cent.

The country’s central bank could not even afford the paper on which to print its worthless trillion-dollar notes. President Mugabe issued edicts to ban price rises, of comedic value were it not for the devastation that hyperinflation wrought upon the people. The miserably low savings and incomes of the impoverished population were wiped out; shopkeepers would frequently double prices between the morning and afternoon, leaving workers’ pay almost valueless by the end of the day.

In 2009 the government scrapped the currency, leaving US dollars and South African rand as the main notes and coins in circulation. To this day, Zimbabwe still has no currency of its own, although the government last year offered to swap old deposit accounts into US dollars, giving savers $5 for each 175 quadrillion (175,000,000,000,000,000) Zimbabwean dollars.

In an extraordinary irony, Zimbabwe now suffers among the world’s worst deflation, currently at -2.3%.

Source: theguardian
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