sandi

What else?

http://www.eturbonews.com/8777/zimba...s-own-currency

GreenDrake

The photo of Mugabe eating cake says it all. Hopefully he will meet the same fate as another cake lover - Marie Antoinette - lifting the veil of suffering covering Zimbabwe.

cybor

Thanks, sandi.
Looks like those holding Zimb. notes will be further screwed.
It will be curious to see how they decide how much the foreign money is actually worth. It seems as though it would be helter skelter as per usual if there's no new measure of how much the new money is worth.

sandi

That country is a basket case... so, so sad!

littlecl

You can actually purchase Zimbabwe Notes as a souvenir type thing at some currency exchanges, at least in the mid east. Never seen so many zeros on one piece of paper. Worth more as a souvenir than actual value for use. Funny how that is. I think that there is actually have a bill with more zeros than the US Debt. hard to imagine.

hguy47

Those poor people are truly suffering, and it is so incredibly sad and unfair. Conditions were pretty bad when we were there in 2004, but so much worse now. It's hard to even imagine a 50,000,000,000 Zimbabwe dollar note, which they had until recently. It's cheaper to use the currency as toilet paper than it is to buy (if you could even do so) the real thing.

In 2004 I bought a newspaper at the newsstand in the Victoria Falls Hotel, and my change (which took about 10 minutes to get while they filled out a lot of paperwork for "exchanging" foreign currency) from the two $1 US bills included a 10,000-unit bill in Zimbabwe currency. We waited for the change just to have it as a souvenir. We enjoyed drinks on the veranda looking out towards the Falls, and when I wrote "50,000" for the tip on the credit card receipt it felt a little weird. I guess now it would be a 50,000,000,000 tip.

I just don't see how the country can come out of it. But you can be sure Mugabe and his cronies will do fine, and probably enjoy a decadent "retirement" in a villa on a beautiful beach somewhere other than Africa.

sundowner

It really is incredible what happened in Zimbabwe under the leadership of Mugabe. In a relatively short amount of time. I know hindsight is always 20/20 but surely they could see what was happening while it was happening. Such a shame that a great country could be ruined like that. And it will take such a long time to recover (if they ever get rid of Mugabe and his cronies).

I was in the Falkland Islands in February and met a guy and his wife, Gavin and Marjorie Blair (gavinblairsafaris.com). They live in Zimbabwe and I asked him if he had any Zim money on him because I would like to buy some of the big bills. He didn't have any but said he would mail some to me when he got home. I received an email from him last week:

<i>"Having been back in Africa for some time now I've been able to start to catch up on a huge backlog of chores. Now that most of the urgent jobs are done I'm hoping to find some time to start looking at my photos from our recent trip to the Falkland Islands.

I've also recently been able to track down a couple of 100 trillion dollar notes - it wasn't easy as by the time we got home Zimbabwe had as good as changed over to a US$ economy. "</i>

A 100 trillion. Unbelievable.

ShayTay

... and they lopped off a lot of zeros even before issuing those notes! It's amazing to realize that the Zim dollar was worth about US$0.02 when I was there in 2000. According to Wikipedia, the Zim dollar was worth US$1.47 when it was first issued in 1980 and was on par with the US dollar in 1983. By November 8, 2008, it was 669 BILLION Zim dollars to one US dollar! All because of the greed of a few politicians...