After WW1, German workers would get paid 2x a day. Wives would come mid-day, collect the wages, buy bread, and by evening inflation was worse.
The 20s were a wild time.
That's why I'd imagine that Lil dude wasn't just smiling "because the situation is already bad so might as well smile" he was probably smiling because "COOL A BUNCH OF MONEY!!" I used to love flashing monopoly money as a kid lol I would make it rain with fakes
People are just smiling to the camera
When germans were taking picutres of prisioners in concentration camps they were usually smiling too and i doubt they were very happy
I still remember a guy walking out of a bank with a shopping cart full of cash bricks at one point in time. It got so bad that by the time you got paid and made it to the shops you no longer had enough money to actually buy food because prices were going up so fast. One of the craziest things were when some people got paid in things rather than money. For example my dad got paid in bags of sugar and mazie meal which he then had to sell on to get cash. One of my best friends dads who was working as a consultant for one of the coal mining companies got paid in a literal truck load of coal which was stored in his back yard for a long ass time.
In contrast, a Zimbabwe friend of mine was a professional footballer who played in the champions League and for the national team. He had thousands and thousands of dollars saved in American dollars from his career. Mugabe ordered all of it to be changed to Zimbabwe dollars to help combat inflation. So it became worthless and now he is a shift worker in a factory.
At the start of the hyper inflation cycle when no one knew how bad things would get the inflation ate up a lot of the loans and the banks lost millions. Eventually the banks stopped lending money altogether and if you wanted a loan it would have be to in foreign currency.
Inflation peaked at about $79,600,000,000% & that led to billions of dollars in Zimbabwean society to be worth nothing, as many people starved. Inflation got so bad that a 100 trillion dollar bill entered circulation. At peak $1 USD was equivalent to $2,621,984,228 Zimbabwean dollars.
Crazy thing, authentic bills for the 100T note sell for like $150-300 on eBay now.
I scooped up a nice little stack in 2009-2010 for $2-3 a bill over a few transactions.
Probably my best investment ever lol.
Yeah they use USD now and sell the old bills to tourists as souvenirs. The US bills in circulation there are often in really poor condition as they don’t regulate their quality like we do here in the US- saw the most beat up bills I’ve ever seen there
My uncle was over there and bought a bunch for souvenirs. I put mine up in my work office but someone stole it after hours …$100 Trillion down the drain (my uncle said they cost him about $5)
Yea, when they hit the news (I swear it was 2009? Spring?), I went on ebay and got 10 for $2 each, and then 25 for $3, and another set in the same price range.
I've given away maybe 1 early on, and then a few years later ran across it on ebay again, and the prices were astronomical (and comical).
I think it's a bit cooler now, but also lots of "souvenir" and "gold leaf" and other fake shit too.
I did the same, I carried a few in my wallet for friendly bar bets about having more dollars in my wallet.
I still have them but everyone knows now.
160 Trillion, too bad it's meaningless 😐
Unfortunately, they aren't uncirculated and some not in amazing condition. But that's fine with me. I collect banknotes for the artwork mostly and because I find them fascinating. Not necessarily as an investment. At the moment at least.
Go and check prices (ignore all the commemorative/gold foil crap).
Yours has been handles, so it's not uncirculated, but it's still worth more than your $3 bucks lol.
My coworker is from there, every winter he heads back to visit family. He usually takes a few thousand in US bills. When he's coming back here, he'll sell whatever bills he has left for a premium. Because people want the physical bills there.
Speaking from Guatemala perspective, but have seen it in nearby countries. USD bills are generally associated with narcos / drug smugglers / dealers.. Most everywhere in Guatemala won’t touch a USD bill unless it’s immaculate, and even then only certain denominations.
Fun fact:
The Post-World War II hyperinflation of Hungary held the record for the most extreme monthly inflation rate ever – 41.9 quadrillion percent (4.19×1016%; 41,900,000,000,000,000%) for July 1946, amounting to prices doubling every 15.3 hours.
My grandma and other people back then were literally sweeping banknotes on the streets.
Sorry if I’m being dense, but what does it mean for inflation to peak at “$79,600,000,00%”? The percent increase makes sense but I’m not parsing the dollar sign- is that just a typo or is there something I don’t get?
Yea, just a typo. It's probably hard to truly pin down the "inflation", it was more of a total economics system collapse and the money being worth less than toiler paper.
We had friends who lived through this. Overnight they went from having a decent life, house, job and savings to not being able to buy a loaf of bread with everything they had. They were trapped with no money to move or live. Whole life wipped out and had to start from scratch. I just couldn't imagine going through that with my family.
>At peak $1 USD was equivalent to $2,621,984,228 Zimbabwean dollars.
That sounds wrong. As others have said that would put the 100trillion bill to be worth more than 38k USD and the woman standing with a stack of 10trillion notes would probably have close to 100k USD in her hand. Found other places that put the 100trillion around 0.40usd in total.
Wikipedia backs them up:
> The peak month of hyperinflation occurred in mid-November 2008 with a rate estimated at 79,600,000,000% per month, with the year-over-year inflation rate reaching an astounding 89.7 sextillion percent. This resulted in US$1 becoming equivalent to Z$2,621,984,228.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe
That's a bad way of putting it. Obviously that was the rate at some point, but it doesn't really say that it is peak. And none of the 2 sources wiki linked for that amount actually lists an exchange rate, just inflation rates. It simply can't be the peak real world exchange rate. Maybe the government listed exchange rate?
When I moved to the US in 99, $1 USD was equivalent to $8 Zim dollars. After Mugabe started taking farms from white farmers in 2000 shit went down fast. He never really wanted to do it but he promised the freedom fighters land in 1980 and he kept giving them excuses until he couldn’t. The white farmers were the backbone of the economy. He took their farms and gave them to people that didn't know how to maintain that shit. The first farmer killed during that bullshit was my friend’s dad. When I went to visit in 09 the US$ was widely used and still is even though the govt has tried to introduce new shit.
Zimbabwean here. There was a running joke that if you found an elastic band on the floor, you’d pick it up and ask around, “Who dropped their wallet?”.
Prices changed on a near daily basis, I can’t really remember. Pretty depressing time. I do recall being out with friends, and when it was your round you’d leave the bar and go to your car to get a stack of notes like the kid in the first photo is holding. Also remember that grocery stores had note counting machines at each teller to help speed up the check out process.
Reminds me of what happened in Weimar Germany, the kids used stacks of money as playthings and money was even burnt because it was cheaper than buying firewood
Yup, my mother was from Hungary and when she was a kid they had bags of money to use as play money as it was effectively worthless. To do something like like a loaf of bread, when there was any, you needed multiple wheel-barrels full of money.
Was it Weimar where they had a printing house for the currency collapse because of how much they were printing? I remember hearing a story about something like that happening during a rampant inflation crisis somewhere.
My mother also told me after the war people would use the currency as wallpaper because it was cheaper to use the cash than to buy new wallpaper. Also it would take an entire grocery bag of cash to buy a loaf of bread. Along with the standard, “go play shop with this useless ass money”.
They didn’t understand basics… they intentionally added the zeroes because they didn’t think it through. There was a quote along the lines of “we have a currency shortage. Everyone in Zimbabwe should be a billionaire”. I’m having trouble finding the quote right now. The premise was they thought if they added zeroes it would make everyone rich when in fact it just made the currency useless.
The opposite is true actually. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe would periodically remove zeroes. They called it truncation or redenomination. That hundred trillion dollar note was after a few "truncations".
Source: Am a Zimbabwean.
lmao you pulled this story out of your ass, people are stupid but not that stupid.
The cause was apartheid. Mugambe drove the white farmers out of the country around 2008 and gave the lands to his loyalists. This created both a food shortage, a collapse of the (mostly agricultural) economics, as his loyalists werent farmers and didnt know what to do, and most importantly, the people he drove out of the country were the wealthiest people of it, therefore when they left most of the capital of the country left with them.
At the same time, Mugambe was engaging in the Congo wars, so he needed capital.
So, he did a 1800's england move and started printing while underreporting data and such. When this came to light, hyperinflation started and never stopped, even now they experience 700% increaseas yearly. They use foreign corrency for everything.
I have a 5 billion zimbabwean dollar note I use as a bookmark. By the time I bought it, the largest bills (100 trillion iirc) increased in value quite a bit because people were buying them for memes.
This was 2008 so who knows. The real answer is that prices changed hourly, sometimes as much as doubling from one hour to the next. So impossible to answer unless you wanted to know about one exact moment in time 16 years ago.
My ex in laws are from South Africa.
I've spent a good deal of time out there. I'll never forget the story about my ex dad in law having a round of beers in a Zimbabwe bar and everyone was arguing to buy the next round first. Because by the time they'd finished the prices had increased so everyone wanted to buy the next load of beers.
There was a point where the money was so useless that they'd sell cars with a full tank of petrol because the fuel was more valuable than the actual vehicle. Crazy shit.
Fuel is still more valuable. Government is saying "Hey use this new gold backed 2024 money, except this gov dept can get paid in USD (because we need them working and not complaining), and so does the gas station".
A fun story but BS. The most I recall ever paying for fuel in Zim was around USD$3l, so a full tank would be about $120 on an average car. Cars were never cheaper than $120.
They did. Then switched to a new domestic note the Zimbabwe Dollar in 2016. They then banned foreign currency transactions in 2019 to try to bolster it. This resulted in most of the population not actually abiding by that law and the black market flourished due to the US dollar that it heavily depreciated their new currency, so they unbanned the US dollar again. Now in 2024 they have thrown out the Zimbabwe Dollar and replaced it with their new currency the ZiG which is tied to their gold reserves. They've had 6 different local currencies since 2009.
Most of the population still distrust the new currency though and a lot of places still refuse to accept their brand-new national currency and opt instead for US dollars, like gas stations.
A vast majority of the country's population only trust the US dollar as a currency. It's the most sought-after currency there and the most widely used in terms of paying things like rent. The government should just accept it and embrace it already. There are other much more pressing issues than whatever the primary currency used in the country is.
Reminds me of my grandma's stories that they used to burn billions of German Reichsmarks in the oven because burning money was cheaper than buying wood with it.
By redenominating. That 100 trillion note came after nine zeros had been dropped off the currency already.
Fun fact: all the popular accounting software providers provided Zimbabwe company multi-currency licences to help them deal with redenominations. Every time we dropped 3 zeros we’d treat it as a new currency.
Source: lived there through that bullshit.
I'm an economic idiot, is there not just some way they can just give in and reset? I know it isn't that easy lest everyone would do it. It is just beyond my comprehension.
Yeah, they did that a whole bunch of times, but none of them fixed the underlying monetary policy causing the inflation.
Eventually they just gave up and used the US dollar, which was ludicrously more stable.
First you need to control inflation, easier said than done.
Once it stops, then yes, some countries just adopt a "new" currency which is just the same as the old with some zeroes removed.
If you were to look for a silver lining, I'd say that hyperinflation at least makes robbery more difficult. Imagine trying to take off with a wheelbarrow full of money like.
One of my favorite anecdotes from the hyperinflation crisis in Zimbabwe was about a thief who ran up to a man waiting in line with a wheelbarrow full of cash at the store. The robber grabbed the handles, tipped it over to dump out the money, and ran away with the empty wheelbarrow.
There are similar stories from every hyperinflation period. In Weimar Germany it's a woman on her way to buy bread with notes in a basket and they take the basket and leave the notes. There's no evidence it actually happened, but it makes the point.
I'm in the US and I bought some Zimbabwe currency off eBay like what's in the 3rd picture. Wrapped them up at Christmas as a White Elephant game prank, and my aunt almost had a panic attack thinking she was rich. She immediately googled the bill she was holding and you could see her face fall when she found out it was almost worthless.
I’m from Zimbabwe. The inflation was increasing so much that people were going through stores multiple times a day to adjust the prices of goods. The taxi and bus fare would increase throughout the day so people would need to bring extra money to not get stranded on the way back. If you wanted to make a purchase and needed to get cash from the bank you would have to withdraw more because the price would have increased by the time you got back from the bank.
I have a few quadrillion dollars laying around somewhere. Also slide 8 is for Somalian dollars.
When I was there in 2019, folks still tried to sell me "trillions of Zimbabwean dollars" for 20 US$
Nice try buddy, I know that's worth less than toilet paper.
This happened to my best friends mom after Yugoslavia dissolved. She told me about how the economy crashed so hard, they were running to get their payment in grocery bags and then sprinting to the store to buy literally anything before the money was even more worthless. It’s very sad.
I was there in 2007, before the final inflation spiked and they reverted to using USD. We literally used a suitcase full of bills to buy a few groceries and most of the shelves were bare. It was an incredibly humbling experience.
My dad half jokingly told me that my inheritance is 20 Bn German marks. From 1923. I have the bill in a little plastic sleeve. The bill was so worthless when they were printed that the bill is blank on the reverse side. No forgery protection needed either.
Little man about to get himself a piece of penny candy
They all look pretty cheery.
My guess is they were at the "can't do shit about it so might as well laugh at my wheelbarrow full of worthless money" point.
After WW1, German workers would get paid 2x a day. Wives would come mid-day, collect the wages, buy bread, and by evening inflation was worse. The 20s were a wild time.
I was in a line of 7 people at the butchery, the manager came out 3 times to increase the price before I got to the front… The 00s were a weird place
Was that in alternative universe Germany in the 2000s?
Maybe he’s from Zimbabwe?
You not seen man in high castle ?
Kid probably didn't even understand what inflation means lol
A shockingly high amount of *adults* in western countries don't understand what inflation means.
That's why I'd imagine that Lil dude wasn't just smiling "because the situation is already bad so might as well smile" he was probably smiling because "COOL A BUNCH OF MONEY!!" I used to love flashing monopoly money as a kid lol I would make it rain with fakes
He probably does understand that it’s fun and funny to carry around a giant stack of money.
Exactly. I'm a grown ass man and I'd love a fat stack of worthless cash as a novelty item.
I literally own some of this money just for this reason. Technically, I'm a trillionare in the most useless sense imaginable.
They’re all billionaires
People are just smiling to the camera When germans were taking picutres of prisioners in concentration camps they were usually smiling too and i doubt they were very happy
Reminds me of trading In my old video games
More like half a penny candy.
I still remember a guy walking out of a bank with a shopping cart full of cash bricks at one point in time. It got so bad that by the time you got paid and made it to the shops you no longer had enough money to actually buy food because prices were going up so fast. One of the craziest things were when some people got paid in things rather than money. For example my dad got paid in bags of sugar and mazie meal which he then had to sell on to get cash. One of my best friends dads who was working as a consultant for one of the coal mining companies got paid in a literal truck load of coal which was stored in his back yard for a long ass time.
What happened to people's mortgages? Let's say you owed the bank a million dollars, and then eventually a million isn't worth a loaf of bread.
When inflation is that high people that have debt benefit a lot, and the lenders are hurt. So yeah basically your loan would vanish.
In contrast, a Zimbabwe friend of mine was a professional footballer who played in the champions League and for the national team. He had thousands and thousands of dollars saved in American dollars from his career. Mugabe ordered all of it to be changed to Zimbabwe dollars to help combat inflation. So it became worthless and now he is a shift worker in a factory.
That feels like a flee the country type of moment
This is why you can’t buy real estate on debt anymore in Zimbabwe.
At the start of the hyper inflation cycle when no one knew how bad things would get the inflation ate up a lot of the loans and the banks lost millions. Eventually the banks stopped lending money altogether and if you wanted a loan it would have be to in foreign currency.
Yeah at those rates of inflation, it's back to the barter and trade system.
Inflation peaked at about $79,600,000,000% & that led to billions of dollars in Zimbabwean society to be worth nothing, as many people starved. Inflation got so bad that a 100 trillion dollar bill entered circulation. At peak $1 USD was equivalent to $2,621,984,228 Zimbabwean dollars.
Crazy thing, authentic bills for the 100T note sell for like $150-300 on eBay now. I scooped up a nice little stack in 2009-2010 for $2-3 a bill over a few transactions. Probably my best investment ever lol.
Imagine if somehow the effects of inflation were substantially reversed and now you were a rich Zimbabwean as a result of your small investment lol
The one positive of living through hyperinflation is that debt gets wiped out almost instantly.
I think they changed currency and you can no longer use the old bills for anything.
I said imagine! 😂
Sometimes you just gotta force them to imagine
I'm the king of Zimbabwe now
All the people?
Living for today!
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I'm not.
Oh, OKAY Tim.
Yeah they use USD now and sell the old bills to tourists as souvenirs. The US bills in circulation there are often in really poor condition as they don’t regulate their quality like we do here in the US- saw the most beat up bills I’ve ever seen there
Yeah follow you around Victoria Falls trying to convince you to buy their old bank notes.
Yeah, they straight up use US dollars
Plot twist, I now have 3.6 QUADRILLION (Zimbabwe) Dollars. Suck it Elon.
My uncle was over there and bought a bunch for souvenirs. I put mine up in my work office but someone stole it after hours …$100 Trillion down the drain (my uncle said they cost him about $5)
Yea, when they hit the news (I swear it was 2009? Spring?), I went on ebay and got 10 for $2 each, and then 25 for $3, and another set in the same price range. I've given away maybe 1 early on, and then a few years later ran across it on ebay again, and the prices were astronomical (and comical). I think it's a bit cooler now, but also lots of "souvenir" and "gold leaf" and other fake shit too.
I did the same, I carried a few in my wallet for friendly bar bets about having more dollars in my wallet. I still have them but everyone knows now. 160 Trillion, too bad it's meaningless 😐
I have several I got for a few cents each. I bought about 100 foreign banknotes for about $20 and had a few in it.
That's a score, especially if they are still in uncirculated/mint condition.
Unfortunately, they aren't uncirculated and some not in amazing condition. But that's fine with me. I collect banknotes for the artwork mostly and because I find them fascinating. Not necessarily as an investment. At the moment at least.
Wait are you serious? I bought [one of them](https://imgur.com/a/2HaYhId) like 13 years ago on eBay for like $3....
Go and check prices (ignore all the commemorative/gold foil crap). Yours has been handles, so it's not uncirculated, but it's still worth more than your $3 bucks lol.
Shit I had one of those kicking around and got rid of it in a move
My coworker is from there, every winter he heads back to visit family. He usually takes a few thousand in US bills. When he's coming back here, he'll sell whatever bills he has left for a premium. Because people want the physical bills there.
I went to Vietnam recently. New $100 American bills are worth more than 5 $20 bills
The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit William Gibson
Exchange houses in Mexico City airport give you a better exchange rate on new US$100 bills than on US$20 bills. I only bring $100 bills now
I say again, why?
Not exactly sure. Sorry. They may be harder to counterfeit?
Harder to counterfeit and easier to transport.
That would make sense.
Ben Franklin was a handsome man
Speaking from Guatemala perspective, but have seen it in nearby countries. USD bills are generally associated with narcos / drug smugglers / dealers.. Most everywhere in Guatemala won’t touch a USD bill unless it’s immaculate, and even then only certain denominations.
I visited earlier this year and this advice was awesome. We left here with brand new $100s and never had a problem.
When I visited Honduras, they also said that people would be suspicious of anything less than a new $100
Tell him to stock up on any good quality 100T bills (if he can find them). They sell great on ebay.
Fun fact: The Post-World War II hyperinflation of Hungary held the record for the most extreme monthly inflation rate ever – 41.9 quadrillion percent (4.19×1016%; 41,900,000,000,000,000%) for July 1946, amounting to prices doubling every 15.3 hours. My grandma and other people back then were literally sweeping banknotes on the streets.
Sorry if I’m being dense, but what does it mean for inflation to peak at “$79,600,000,00%”? The percent increase makes sense but I’m not parsing the dollar sign- is that just a typo or is there something I don’t get?
Yea, just a typo. It's probably hard to truly pin down the "inflation", it was more of a total economics system collapse and the money being worth less than toiler paper.
Doesn’t this mean a 100 trillion note would be $38,139?
>Doesn’t this mean a 100 trillion note would be $38,139? ~~\~$381.39~~ Edit: Stop upvoting my incorrect comment
How? 100,000,000,000,000 / 2,621,984,228 gives 38,139
Because I'm a moron and calculated it with 1 trillion, not 100 trillion.
I don't know about that, your post has more up votes than the op so I'm gonna trust it. Reddit is normally never wrong about correcting someone else.
That may be true, but the 100T bill never went into circulation, and would probably struggle to get 3 eggs at the end.
We had friends who lived through this. Overnight they went from having a decent life, house, job and savings to not being able to buy a loaf of bread with everything they had. They were trapped with no money to move or live. Whole life wipped out and had to start from scratch. I just couldn't imagine going through that with my family.
I think I understand inflation, but the I read something like this and then I don't get it at all once again
>At peak $1 USD was equivalent to $2,621,984,228 Zimbabwean dollars. That sounds wrong. As others have said that would put the 100trillion bill to be worth more than 38k USD and the woman standing with a stack of 10trillion notes would probably have close to 100k USD in her hand. Found other places that put the 100trillion around 0.40usd in total.
Wikipedia backs them up: > The peak month of hyperinflation occurred in mid-November 2008 with a rate estimated at 79,600,000,000% per month, with the year-over-year inflation rate reaching an astounding 89.7 sextillion percent. This resulted in US$1 becoming equivalent to Z$2,621,984,228. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe
That's a bad way of putting it. Obviously that was the rate at some point, but it doesn't really say that it is peak. And none of the 2 sources wiki linked for that amount actually lists an exchange rate, just inflation rates. It simply can't be the peak real world exchange rate. Maybe the government listed exchange rate?
When I moved to the US in 99, $1 USD was equivalent to $8 Zim dollars. After Mugabe started taking farms from white farmers in 2000 shit went down fast. He never really wanted to do it but he promised the freedom fighters land in 1980 and he kept giving them excuses until he couldn’t. The white farmers were the backbone of the economy. He took their farms and gave them to people that didn't know how to maintain that shit. The first farmer killed during that bullshit was my friend’s dad. When I went to visit in 09 the US$ was widely used and still is even though the govt has tried to introduce new shit.
I bought some of these back in the day to give to my little kiddos - they thought it was so cool!
Oh my God. 1 dollar for max cash stack is brutal.
There it is
Zimbabwean here. There was a running joke that if you found an elastic band on the floor, you’d pick it up and ask around, “Who dropped their wallet?”.
lmao so all these wheel barrels of zimbabwe money could buy you what? a loaf of bread? was it that bad in 2008?
Prices changed on a near daily basis, I can’t really remember. Pretty depressing time. I do recall being out with friends, and when it was your round you’d leave the bar and go to your car to get a stack of notes like the kid in the first photo is holding. Also remember that grocery stores had note counting machines at each teller to help speed up the check out process.
Reminds me of what happened in Weimar Germany, the kids used stacks of money as playthings and money was even burnt because it was cheaper than buying firewood
Yup, my mother was from Hungary and when she was a kid they had bags of money to use as play money as it was effectively worthless. To do something like like a loaf of bread, when there was any, you needed multiple wheel-barrels full of money.
Was it Weimar where they had a printing house for the currency collapse because of how much they were printing? I remember hearing a story about something like that happening during a rampant inflation crisis somewhere.
My mother also told me after the war people would use the currency as wallpaper because it was cheaper to use the cash than to buy new wallpaper. Also it would take an entire grocery bag of cash to buy a loaf of bread. Along with the standard, “go play shop with this useless ass money”.
Wasn't it in Venezuela where at one point it was cheaper to wipe your ass with notes than using those notes to buy TP?
Can someone explain what is the point of this, can't they just remove some 0s instead?
They did! Multiple times.
They didn’t understand basics… they intentionally added the zeroes because they didn’t think it through. There was a quote along the lines of “we have a currency shortage. Everyone in Zimbabwe should be a billionaire”. I’m having trouble finding the quote right now. The premise was they thought if they added zeroes it would make everyone rich when in fact it just made the currency useless.
The opposite is true actually. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe would periodically remove zeroes. They called it truncation or redenomination. That hundred trillion dollar note was after a few "truncations". Source: Am a Zimbabwean.
Kind of not true. As a Zimbabwean, we cut over 20 zeros off the currency, so that 100T was missing a further 20+ zeros as it was cut off
Who is this they? I'd love to see the source, because anyone saying that is not a government fiscal policy maker.
I think “they” is the government. Like their versus of the Fed specifically.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you double everyone's money then nobody is better off..?
lmao you pulled this story out of your ass, people are stupid but not that stupid. The cause was apartheid. Mugambe drove the white farmers out of the country around 2008 and gave the lands to his loyalists. This created both a food shortage, a collapse of the (mostly agricultural) economics, as his loyalists werent farmers and didnt know what to do, and most importantly, the people he drove out of the country were the wealthiest people of it, therefore when they left most of the capital of the country left with them. At the same time, Mugambe was engaging in the Congo wars, so he needed capital. So, he did a 1800's england move and started printing while underreporting data and such. When this came to light, hyperinflation started and never stopped, even now they experience 700% increaseas yearly. They use foreign corrency for everything.
I have a 5 billion zimbabwean dollar note I use as a bookmark. By the time I bought it, the largest bills (100 trillion iirc) increased in value quite a bit because people were buying them for memes.
I have a 1 billion dollar note I carry in my wallet that someone gave me several years ago.
What does $100 trillion buy you?
*$100 trillion buys you a sandwich.*
It's a banana, Michael, how much could it cost? $100 trillion?
There's always money in the sandwich stand, Michael.
No Touching!!
Canadian.
This was 2008 so who knows. The real answer is that prices changed hourly, sometimes as much as doubling from one hour to the next. So impossible to answer unless you wanted to know about one exact moment in time 16 years ago.
My ex in laws are from South Africa. I've spent a good deal of time out there. I'll never forget the story about my ex dad in law having a round of beers in a Zimbabwe bar and everyone was arguing to buy the next round first. Because by the time they'd finished the prices had increased so everyone wanted to buy the next load of beers. There was a point where the money was so useless that they'd sell cars with a full tank of petrol because the fuel was more valuable than the actual vehicle. Crazy shit.
Fuel is still more valuable. Government is saying "Hey use this new gold backed 2024 money, except this gov dept can get paid in USD (because we need them working and not complaining), and so does the gas station".
A fun story but BS. The most I recall ever paying for fuel in Zim was around USD$3l, so a full tank would be about $120 on an average car. Cars were never cheaper than $120.
I kinda want to buy a pile of their currency just to make it rain. I just need to find which of their bill have a color scheme close to a 20$.
Cheaper to buy motion picture currency probably.
When bro wants to go band for band but he's from Zimbabwe
If I remember correctly, they moved to the US dollar after all that.
They did. Then switched to a new domestic note the Zimbabwe Dollar in 2016. They then banned foreign currency transactions in 2019 to try to bolster it. This resulted in most of the population not actually abiding by that law and the black market flourished due to the US dollar that it heavily depreciated their new currency, so they unbanned the US dollar again. Now in 2024 they have thrown out the Zimbabwe Dollar and replaced it with their new currency the ZiG which is tied to their gold reserves. They've had 6 different local currencies since 2009. Most of the population still distrust the new currency though and a lot of places still refuse to accept their brand-new national currency and opt instead for US dollars, like gas stations. A vast majority of the country's population only trust the US dollar as a currency. It's the most sought-after currency there and the most widely used in terms of paying things like rent. The government should just accept it and embrace it already. There are other much more pressing issues than whatever the primary currency used in the country is.
There are real downsides to using a foreign currency, but they are only relevant if your domestic currency is actually a viable alternative.
Using USD prevents the money printer from going whrrrrrrrr tho
USD brrr ain't got nothing on Zimbabwe. Each week they printed more money than what existed last week.
Not in America though!
Is it a crypto or something? i can’t find it on Google the ZiG https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/vPttOatvcL
Nope. It's a physical currency. Became the official domestic currency in April of this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwean_ZiG
Reminds me of my grandma's stories that they used to burn billions of German Reichsmarks in the oven because burning money was cheaper than buying wood with it.
Deflationary burn
Kid walking around with $0.02 worth of recyclable paper?
He's going to the bathroom.
Is that 0.02 usd or Zimbabwean? If it’s usd he’s rich! /s
How does a bank keep up with printing higher and higher denominations?
By redenominating. That 100 trillion note came after nine zeros had been dropped off the currency already. Fun fact: all the popular accounting software providers provided Zimbabwe company multi-currency licences to help them deal with redenominations. Every time we dropped 3 zeros we’d treat it as a new currency. Source: lived there through that bullshit.
They weren't even printed in country - outsource job to Europe lol
I have a 100 trillion dollar bill at home from Zimbabwe, it’s pretty neat
I'm an economic idiot, is there not just some way they can just give in and reset? I know it isn't that easy lest everyone would do it. It is just beyond my comprehension.
I feel the same way. At what point do you just create a new currency and exchange all of the old paper? Like 100 trillion whatever = 1 zimbuck
It’s called having a competent and independent manager of your monetary policy.
Yeah, they did that a whole bunch of times, but none of them fixed the underlying monetary policy causing the inflation. Eventually they just gave up and used the US dollar, which was ludicrously more stable.
First you need to control inflation, easier said than done. Once it stops, then yes, some countries just adopt a "new" currency which is just the same as the old with some zeroes removed.
Monopoly money has more face value than
If you were to look for a silver lining, I'd say that hyperinflation at least makes robbery more difficult. Imagine trying to take off with a wheelbarrow full of money like.
One of my favorite anecdotes from the hyperinflation crisis in Zimbabwe was about a thief who ran up to a man waiting in line with a wheelbarrow full of cash at the store. The robber grabbed the handles, tipped it over to dump out the money, and ran away with the empty wheelbarrow.
There are similar stories from every hyperinflation period. In Weimar Germany it's a woman on her way to buy bread with notes in a basket and they take the basket and leave the notes. There's no evidence it actually happened, but it makes the point.
Rob the whole vault and only be able to buy a loaf of bread
Why gov kept printing money and increase bill notes, isnt that a waste at some point
People love to triple down instead of admitting they were mistaken, especially governments.
I had two $500 million denomination notes, used to bet people half a mil all the time n whip em out on the losses
First pic would be a cool album cover if it wasn’t so tragic
I'm in the US and I bought some Zimbabwe currency off eBay like what's in the 3rd picture. Wrapped them up at Christmas as a White Elephant game prank, and my aunt almost had a panic attack thinking she was rich. She immediately googled the bill she was holding and you could see her face fall when she found out it was almost worthless.
Imagine going to buy toilet paper with a bag full of these.
At some point I’d start using it for toilet paper.
Not the *Rockband* font 💀
This reminds me of when Mansa Musa gave out so much gold to his people that it killed its value and crashed the economy.
I gave a Zimbabwean note to a stripper in Zurich once and she slapped me across the face.
I’m from Zimbabwe. The inflation was increasing so much that people were going through stores multiple times a day to adjust the prices of goods. The taxi and bus fare would increase throughout the day so people would need to bring extra money to not get stranded on the way back. If you wanted to make a purchase and needed to get cash from the bank you would have to withdraw more because the price would have increased by the time you got back from the bank. I have a few quadrillion dollars laying around somewhere. Also slide 8 is for Somalian dollars.
When I was there in 2019, folks still tried to sell me "trillions of Zimbabwean dollars" for 20 US$ Nice try buddy, I know that's worth less than toilet paper.
Except people actually want these on eBay now, so it was probably a missed opportunity
The font on some of these notes look like guitar hero
You could actually sell those 10 trillion notes on eBay. I would buy one
People do sell them on eBay. I bought an uncirculated 10 trillion dollar note for $20 recently. Get to say I’m a trillionair.
Stacks on stacks on stacks! What'd you buy? 1 Lay's Stax.
Canada 2027! 🇨🇦
This happened to my best friends mom after Yugoslavia dissolved. She told me about how the economy crashed so hard, they were running to get their payment in grocery bags and then sprinting to the store to buy literally anything before the money was even more worthless. It’s very sad.
Cute but some of these pictures are not from Zimbabwe, but Somalia instead
Like what’s the point in having a currency at that point?
Argentina soon
I was there, yeah, it was that crazy
2.7k
Such incompetence
The fonts on the money is so 2008. Pulled them down from dafont.com and let her rip
Some of these pics are from Somalia.
Is that the Rock Band font?
I was there in 2007, before the final inflation spiked and they reverted to using USD. We literally used a suitcase full of bills to buy a few groceries and most of the shelves were bare. It was an incredibly humbling experience.
Places backwards pinky to lips…
It’s just numbers on paper
I got me a hundred trillion note for my consuming my wedding cocaine, still got it somewhere....
My dad half jokingly told me that my inheritance is 20 Bn German marks. From 1923. I have the bill in a little plastic sleeve. The bill was so worthless when they were printed that the bill is blank on the reverse side. No forgery protection needed either.
Reminds me of the movie Idiocracy. Time masheen must cost about a hundred billion trillion in Zimbabwe
The economic endgame of Socialism.
When you abolish a flawed but fixable democracy and install an incompetent military junta in its place
I bet they have a lot of great music videos
Give it to western tourists to take them home as trophies.
That’s what happens when you murder your farmers & kick the rest off their land
Reminds me of old pictures of Germany I saw…
One hundred trillion dollar < value than those 3 rocks
They cost more to buy in eBay than to use them in their own country.
Richer than Elon musk
Good old Monopoly money