thanks Hobbo! that was interesting. I loved the little historical snippet as to why .... also, some very beautiful notes .....
Actually Zimbabwe's currency depreciated quite a bit in value since that slideshow was done. The last note they issued in the old dollar was a $100 Billion Dollar note. It was in circulation for 10 days, then they did a 10 billion : 1 New Super Duper Zimbabwe Fuerte(strong in Spanish, ala the Venezuelan Bolivar "fuerte") Dollar.
That slide show is obsolete... the note is denominated in the old dollars, of which now there's about 100 billion to the US dollar... meaning that note is worth aproximately 1/100 of a US cent! They recently redominated their dollar so that 1 of the new dollars equals 10 billion of the old ones. That mighr make accounting easier but they've done nothing to curb the root causes of their hyperinflation so expect them to start putting on the zeroes again eventually. I'm suprised they didn't include the Hungarian pengo, just before they switched to the forint, the currency was historically the lowest value of any currency ever recorded. They had actually released a note worth 100 quintillion pengo (that's 1 followed by 20 zeros), the highest nominal denomination of any banknote ever released (they had printed, but never released, a note denominate 10 times higher than that!) At the time the pengo was abandoned, the entire paper money supply of pengos was worth aproximately 1/1000 of a US cent! The notes were literally not worth the paper they were printed on at that point...
Color also becomes worthless The more the Zimbabwe note has gone down in value the more ugly it has become. I have a series from 1997-98 where they still had alot of colors represented. But when money becomes obsolete color as well.
Coins became worthless with the high notes coming in. But last week I read that the banks are excepting the coins again. So now people are bringing bottles full of the stuff to shops and banks to make payments, etc. Sure glad I am not one of the tellers that has to count all the coins. And then to wash hands after that without possibly be able to pay for a bit of soap... I wonder when people from Zimbabwe or poor countries have to travel like to the Olympics what they do in their spare time. They cant shop, etc. Must be a very bad time.
alot of banks have sorting machines in which they just dump the coins in and the machine counts out the value n they deduct a "nominal fee" from what you brought it.
