flickering pictures

Okay, maybe unofficially.

On June 6, the National Post reported that “It’s a sad day when those that can afford to buy a loaf of bread need to cart 600-million Zimbabwean dollars to the store.” Less than two months later, a sad day has turned downright miserable: you could trudge to that same store with a hundred billion dollars in your pocket — or more likely in your wheelbarrow — but you still wouldn’t have enough for lunch.

At 16h20 EST today, an XE.com search reported that one U.S. dollar is worth a staggering 18,681,527,512.36 Zimbabwe dollars. Put differently, 1 ZWD = 0.00000000005353 USD. Check again in an hour.

In an attempt to make the problem go away — as opposed to fixing it — President Robert Mugabe’s government has decided to simply chop ten zeroes off the end of its currency, making a $10,000,000,000 note worth one Zimbabwe dollar. Perhaps a better strategy would have been to remove the “1″ in front of all the zeroes. This from a government that last week actually ran out of paper to print its Monopoly money on.

From the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business:

On Wednesday, central bank governor Gideon Gono announced he was dropping 10 zeros from the currency, to turn 10 billion dollars into one, effective Friday. That comes a week after he introduced a 100 billion-dollar note that was not enough to buy a loaf of bread.

Mr. Gono said high inflation was affecting operations of the country’s computer systems. Inflation is officially running at 2.2 million per cent but independent economists say it’s nearer 12.5 million per cent.

Computers, electronic calculators and automated teller machines at Zimbabwe’s banks cannot handle basic transactions in billions and trillions of dollars.

Amazingly, Mugabe is still convinced he’s the man to lead Zimbabwe, even though he almost single-handedly turned Africa’s breadbasket into a bloodied sinkhole of poverty and violence, with no sign of recovery in sight.

Well, almost no sign. Under fierce — but painfully late — international pressure, Mugabe is holding power-sharing talks with Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader who won a recent election but lost an inordinately corrupt run-off vote because many of his supporters were either beaten, raped, killed, mutilated or otherwise intimidated.

In case you’re into trivia, this is a long way from being the worst hyper-inflation in history. In 1946, the total value of all Hungarian banknotes in circulation was equivalent to one thousandth of a U.S. cent. According to Wikipedia (and the book it sources): “It is the most severe known incident of inflation recorded, peaking at 4.19 × 10¹⁶ percent per month (prices double every 15 hours).”

Image via The Guardian.

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