I think I want one of these.

[randomness]

According to various news reports, it was worth about €30 when it came out a little over two weeks ago. It buys a loaf of bread now. The government has just announced that it is lopping off twelve zeroes off the currency, and that all old currency will be declared worthless as of June 30th.



I can wait.

Comments

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Dude. If you get one, perhaps you could snag one for me as well? That would be worth framing. :-}

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

I, too, would be interested in getting one of these. If you get a couple, I'll gladly buy one off of you.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I was thinking that! There's apparently some financial blogger who has a ten billion note framed on his wall.

Piker. :)

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

They're not too hard to come by. I have a 500 million dollar bill and a 1 cent bill.

[dpolicar]

Wow, and I thought Brazil had it bad, back in the day.
They could just establish the Trillion as their new currency.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Sure! My suspicion is that they'll start appearing on eBay, at rather high prices, fairly soon. The time to buy them is after they stop being newsworthy conversation pieces, at which point--depending on how common they get--they may be available in bulk.

Hey, now there's an idea. A Cheapass-type game which uses real Zimbabwe dollars as game money.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

They just did something equivalent to that, by announcing they were replacing a trillion old dollars with one new dollar.

I do think you have the hang of this whole central banking thing!

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they're all over eBay. I'm waiting until they're too common to bother auctioning. :)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I.e., the smaller denominations are all over eBay.

I haven't seen a hundred trillion show up yet.

[n5red.livejournal.com]

30 euros for a loaf of bread? Did Whole Foods open a store there?

[blipvert.livejournal.com]

Me too!

How ironic -- the mere act of the government declaring the notes worthless will actually cause them to have some value, while now they really are worthless even though the government says otherwise.

Of course it makes sense, as discontinuing a currency is the ultimate deflationary act. It will be interesting to see whether the dead currency overtakes the live ones, and by what margin.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

No, the buying power went from 30 euros to a loaf of bread (which I'll guess costs on the order of one or two) in two weeks.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Oh, the dead currencies--they have two others, as they've lopped off something like 13 zeroes already in two separate changes the last couple of years--have all become worth more on the collector market than they are worth as legal tender in pretty short order, regardless of what the government does; it's not a matter of the government saying something and the notes suddenly having more value.

It's more like, there's some base value that the notes have as collectors items (call it a penny a note, say) and the face value drops through that base value faster than the government can keep up.

The hardest part of getting the notes is going to Zimbabwe to collect them, I think, and even then I think people can ship them out, although because of currency restrictions and lack of postage they may have to do it from across the border.

The border controls are pretty lax, though. Well, at least for tourists they are. I could have been carrying a backpack full of cash if I'd really wanted to. When I changed something like 80 Botswanan pula--less than $25, at the time--I got a double-handful sized brick of Zimbabwe paper money in exchange, so a backpack full wouldn't have been much.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

one or two euros, that is. :)

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Put me in with the bulk trillion note order!

That's just nuts, though. Really and truly nuts.

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

*sigh* You know, there's something sort of sad about seeing one in the flesh. It reminds me that banknotes are in theory one of the national symbols; someone designs them, with pictures and motifs that are meant to say something about what a nation is and what it's proud of. Aw. Poor Zimbabwe.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's a beautiful country, with friendly people, now desperate. No one deserves this, particularly not them.

I hope to get back there in happier times.

[redbird]

They're barely money now, since the government has declared that it's now legally okay to do business in foreign currency&dollars, euros, Namibia currency, whatever you have and someone wants.

[jim-p.livejournal.com]

Yeah, any idea how we can score a brick of these? I'd love to frame it :)

[ceo]

Why did they even bother printing "SPECIMEN" on it?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is why I want one of these in particular. Now that they've given up, I think it's unlikely that they'll break $100 trillion on the next go-round...if there is one.

The flip side of this is that they might end up being more in demand as collectors items.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

That looks photoshopped in. My suspicion is that there's some legal requirement.