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

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...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

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

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

This will hurt me...

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