A coffee? That will be one million dollars, thank you.

I was looking at this photo essay from Foreign Policy magazine this morning, and one photo struck me in particular. It essentially was someone packing a briefcase full of cash. As I mentioned yesterday, with inflation running at over 100,000 percent, Zimbabwe's rate of inflation is currently the highest in the world.

Now, like most I suspect, I'm struggling to get my head around what that means, and its broader implications for people. Using a couple of different online currency convertors, ZWD$1 million fetches roughly:

AUS $37 or
US $34 or
Euro €21.

Now this is achieved using flat currency transaction on market rate. In the real world, Zimbabweans would have to take whatever the black marketers are offering. The scantest of research reveals that the best that they might hope for out of that same ZWD $1 million is somewhere between US $3 to US $5.

To be totally honest with you, I still can't get my head around it. Surely wages cannot keep up with that sort of inflation. I have visions of a Zimbabwean Nursing Federation vehemently arguing for a 200,000 percent pay rise to be phased in over two weeks! Yet there can be no way that practical responses are able to be made in that environment. Does the state just shift to printing larger denominations in currency? Is there a million dollar note? What do you do with all of the one, two or five dollar notes? The coins? Do people even bother with 'hard' currency anyway? Surely a goat is worth more than a million dollars, because the goat is still a goat in the afternoon, whereas the million may only be worth half a million. I would imagine that the very notion of 'hard currency' disappears.

The only assumption that I can make is that the entire system breaks down, and I suspect that this has happened in Zimbabwe. Having lived my whole life in Australia, where we have been fortunate enough to avoid such breakdown, I'd be interested to hear if anyone has a tale that might allow me to get my head around the implications of runaway inflation.

I've included a couple of links here that might be interesting to anyone who might like to read about Zimbabwe by Zimbabweans. The first is This is Zimbabwe, and the second is Zimbabwe Metro. Both a worth a look.

Comments

Pat said…

Hi there!

Thanks for visiting the Guelph blog. As to how to pronounce it, if you think of Santa's "elf's" and then put a "GW" in front of "elf".

Hope this helps! :)

Pat

Guelph Daily Photo, My Photos.

1 April 2008 at 14:45

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

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Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

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Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

This will hurt me...

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