Zimbabwe offers new exchange rate: $1 for 35,000,000,000,000,000 old dollars | Hacker News Reader

Zimbabwe offers new exchange rate: $1 for 35,000,000,000,000,000 old dollars

theguardian.com

88 pointsshahocean92 comments

Brazil did this in the 90's but with a twist: they created a transition currency, the URV (Real unit of value), and the people believed when they introduced (1:1 to URV) new currency (R$ or Real).

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-f...

I think Greece should introduce a currency like that and pay pensions and government employees in it. It should have a floating exchange rate to the Euro. They should call it the 'faux'

Please don’t bring this kind of comment here. It’s pretty much impossible for a flippant joke about shredding a large group of people’s pensions to result in productive discussion.

Pretty much anything about politics degrades rapidly, which is why politics is 'off topic' in the guidelines.

It's a serious idea, presented in a sarcastic way.

Defaulting on all Euro debts, exiting Europe, bankrupting the banks, issuing a new currency is a viable solution. Yes it's a horrible hang over to live through but it means removing the horrendous debt burden for the next 50 years. See how Greece is having trouble with every IMF payment in the past few months? If the EU has its way Greece will continue paying chunks of cash like those for decades to come. Better to burn everything down and start over. They might even pick up some Russian and Chinese financial support along the way.

If you pegged it to the Euro, it'd be pointless.

It should have a floating exchange rate to the Euro. Not pegged, but floating.

If "floating exchange rate to the Euro" = "floating exchange rate full stop"

"floating to", "floating with", "floating against" is a minefield.

I highly doubt that's all that would be required. If you assume a level of cronyism/corruption akin to say .ch, .de or .se then it might work. But if Greece otherwise stays the way it is then this would merely be a stay of execution.

It's certainly no panacea. Greece has been living beyond it's means and a certain reduction in living standards is going to have to happen. What a bout of inflation allows is resetting everyone's salaries, pensions, etc to a lower level without inducing extra unemployment which requires an even larger correction.

There is always the danger that Greece will say "to Hell with it," print money to fund their expenditures, and get hyperinflation. But that's a level of mismanagement even worse than Greece has shown in the past.

"Defaulting on all Euro debts, exiting Europe, bankrupting the banks, issuing a new currency is a viable solution. Yes it's a horrible hang over to live through but it means removing the horrendous debt burden for the next 50 years."

If they do not tend the root of the problems, they might as well do this every 50 years. Things like 14th month payments (while it was a thing) or tax evasions that could reach industrial levels on their own will make things hard, even without the IMF or EU interfering.

Well I was thinking mostly of what options does Greece has if it is not allowed to print money to get out of debt. The Brazilian virtual currency, named the opposite of virtual, was an interesting idea. Another alternative could be for them to have an aggressive sales tax domestically while giving tax relief for exports, basically making them competitive internationally while their money doesn't go as far locally, but I think EU rules forbid this sort of subsidy.

Another idea would be to multiply pension plans with whatever the drachma to euro ratio ends up being - that way only the world bank suffers and the pensioners can keep their standard of living. They would likely have to do something similar for employees and business owners, but that would still be manageable.

Ultimately everyone is going to take a haircut. Creditors and pensioners.

They will have to shred this sooner or later. Greeks go super early in retirement and have huge pay outs. This was not a problem in the past, when their currency devaluated every year XX%. After a decade or two your payments were worth next to nothing. But with the Euro this changed and this causes problems.

Germans have to work to 69 now and get less than the average Greek retiree.

It is not new thing, it happened in Germany, Turkey, Yugoslavia... but yes, in Zimbabwe is exaggerated. I bought some bills of hyperinflated currencies through Ebay:

One hundred trillion dollars of Zimbabwe.

50 million marks of between wars Germany.

Some millions of Turkish lira.

The ironic thing is a million Zimbabwean dollars is worth far more as a novelty note sold on ebay, than it is as currency in it's own country.

I bought one early in the bitcoin era when 1BTC was ~$1, probably spent over $3,000 at least in today's BTC or something.

"The hyperinflated, worthless Marks became widely collected abroad. The Los Angeles Times estimated in 1924 that more of the decommissioned notes were spread about the United States than existed in Germany."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...

My late mother had a two billion mark stamp from Weimar-era Germany, though I see from Wikipedia that's not even close to the record (they have a picture of a five billon mark example in their article).

It had gotten so bad that they didn't even bother printing new stamps; they'd just overprint the new value on the old stamp in black ink.

Zimbabwe: proof that even when shit goes completely off the rails, people can be cowed into putting up with it. At least they didn't go on an international ethnic cleansing binge like the Nazis did.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1099467/Mugabes-geno...

You are right, this cleansing is only within their borders...

I know people there.

Brilliant country with a lot of potential. Psychotic leadership - it's far worse and more violent than a lot of people realise. (As in - throwing dissenters down mine shafts violent.)

The West is partly to blame. Mugabe and Zanu-PF aren't going anywhere while Zim remains a cheap under-the-counter source of diamonds and minerals.

The book "The scramble for Africa", a history of colonialism in Africa written in 1991, has this upbeat assessment of Mugabe as representative of a new breed of progressive African leaders: "his creed was pragmatic African nationalism .. he told the new nation that the 'wrongs of the past must be forgiven and forgotten'. Mugabe was a statesman in the making." How depressing that this turned out to be so wide of the mark.

How easily we forget that people change, and sometimes not for the better. It's easy to start well; ending well -- that's the trick.

A friend reminded me of http://www.petertatchell.net/direct_action/mugabe.htm . How much could've been avoided if we'd been willing to enforce our laws?

To blame? The US embargoed the state of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) on every single political and economic issue we could find. We created Zimbabwe.

Rhodesia was run as a segregationist society on ever level. But if you want to change that, you don't just wall off the people, throw a knife in the pit, and declare that the strongest survive. Which is exactly what we did. Both sides were forced to wage all kinds of guerilla warfare in an attempt to survive. It is no surprise that a brutal, corrupt leader like Mugabe emerged. They were the only ones that would survive such a challenge.

Rhodesia was a productive state with a developed economy. After Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, decades of progress was undone. The new regime essentially just looted the country for themselves. Everyone there is worse off now! Worse yet, the segregation of blacks was just replaced with the segregation of whites via 'land redistribution' schemes.

The hyperinflation ended in 1924, the Nazis took over in 1933.

The Beer Hall Putsch (the first attempted coup by the Nazis) was in 1923.

I wonder how quickly the US dollar would inflate if it was no longer the "global reserve".

We print and waste an enormous amount of money compared to other countries that don't have that luxury.

This is false. Japan has been doing QE long before we have, and is fine (actually they weren't even able to get inflation for a very long time).

Printing money doesn't necessarily mean inflation is going to happen. There are so many factors involved, and the fact of the matter is the market cares about other things more than supply.

Printing money in US context however is indeed going to cause pretty serious inflation. Also in a world where we worry too much about inequalities, those american who do not have fixed assets are likely to get hurt even more.

Printing money, and putting it into circulation, in values that exceed economic growth always results in inflation.

Inflation is trivial to cause. Deflation takes a bit more work and discipline, and is subject to the requirement that economic growth exceed increase in money supply - but the method behind it is well understood.

The challenge is to keep your inflation at a low, reasonable level - say 3-5%. I don't think anybody has figured out a repeatable method to do that.

It is trivial to cause inflation, but central banks are either not allowed or ideologically opposed to effective means of putting money in circulation. Many central banks have printed enormous amounts of money and inflated the currency less than they would like to because they're buying second-hand bonds with the printed money. They've been really frustrated with the inefficiency of this, which I find amusing and slightly suspicious. Just printing money and giving it away doesn't necessarily cause short-term inflation. The way in which it is done is the key.

I absolutely guarantee you that if the US government just started cranking out a tax return to its citizens, inflation would return with great efficiency.

What you're saying doesn't hold up empirically. And like they say, if it doesn't hold up in practice, how should we accept it as theory

Which of the three do you think doesn't hold up empirically?

That we can cause inflation at will (pretty much universally agreed); that we can cause deflation with a bit of discipline/rigor (the mechanism for this is well understood as well); or that we are unable to reliably maintain a persistent low positive inflation rate (There is a Nobel prize for you if you have a guaranteed formula for that).

> Printing money doesn't necessarily mean inflation is going to happen.

LOL. Come to Japan and see for yourself if prices don't rise. Your comment is a big lie.

Perhaps it might be more correct to say that printing money does not necessarily mean wage inflation, but it is very likely to cause price inflation.

It's a factor, but there are many other factors involved.

In the first QE rounds by the US after the 2008 recession hit, money was being printed to basically end up in bank's coffers, but lending didn't go up correspondingly, so the actual amount of money in circulation didn't really change.

I think the big reason for the link being weaker than expected is that it's the money actually in circulation ( in the "being used" sense) that matters, not the amount of money in existence. It's all just numbers, after all, and if you're not doing anything with them, it's the same as if it doesn't exist.

Hey, turns out I actually live in Japan, and have been here for the most recent round of QE.

The value of the yen has dropped something like 33% compared to the dollar (went from $1 = 100 to $1 = 140 in the past 3 years) but yearly CPI increases have never hit above 2 or 3 percent.

Prices have gone up, but mainly due to the sales tax increase, not due to QE. Considering that CPI is almost definitionally linked to inflation, I feel that it's a pretty good indicator of lack of real inflation.

Turns out I live in Japan as well and we must not be shopping in the same places at all, because the prices increases are way more than the difference from 5% tax to 8% tax. I guess it's your opinion against mine.

PS: I noticed you have been in Japan for like 3 years. I have been here for 8 years. I guess some experience counts as well.

How do you measure inflation? What is assets inflation?

The US government can "print" staggering amounts of money, because the Dollar economy is staggeringly bigger than any amount they would want to print.

At what point is the paper/materials worth more than the money printed on it?

That's already the case for the US penny.

I'm pretty sure that happened a long time ago. But the latent value of the materials is hard to recover--you could recycle the paper, but that requires a lot of expensive equipment, and there are many accessible sources of pulp which are easier to collect. Such an endeavor would inevitably fail because it lacks the efficiencies of scale.

As an interesting aside, US pennies minted before 1982 contain $0.018 worth of copper. It's not nearly the problem that Zimbabwe has, because pennies makes up so little of the US currency in circulation. But one might think an enterprising entrepreneur could profit from this. But again the problem falls to inefficiencies of scale: you simply can't harvest and sort enough pennies quickly enough to make the effort worthwhile (machinery even exists for this purpose).

I remember someone observing that physical currency from 100 years ago was worth more than you'd've made by investing it in stocks, property, or any financial instrument you care to think of for those 100 years.

Maybe if you have a rare and beautifully printed treasury bond, it's worth more than the (now antique) cash it cost!

I bought a couple of the $100tn notes as a gift a few years ago. The frame I put them in cost more.

Curiously, the eBay price is higher now than it was then ($34 vs. $6.25). So they'll be back to being worth a trillion in about ... 185 million years at the current rate of increase.

That happened around 2009

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jun/23/zimbabwean-cann...

It is strange using an ATM in Zimbabwe in that it dispenses US dollars. Unlike most US ATMs, it will dispense fifties and hundreds. Larger notes are mostly clean, but dollar bills are absolutely filthy. They are used until they fall apart.

Notes are US, but coins are South African rands.

Ecuador also uses the US dollar as currency, cash machines dispense $20s and $50s.

Tourists from the USA should bring $1 coins and leave $1 notes at home, people don't like the notes as they get dirty.

Ecuador mints coins (1, 5, 10, 25, 50¢) which are the same shape as US ones, and interchangeable in Ecuador.

Cambodia as well.

That would be nice, but with weight restrictions being what they are particularly on international flights, toting along an extra two pounds of $100 in coins is unlikely.

Romania changed their currency way back, but they kept the name of the currency equal, and they even kept using the old currency for some time.

So, there I was, getting money from the ATM, thinking I had hit the jackpot :)

It's super confusing, even today.

In France something similar happened, one day a poor man came up to me and asked me 'Tu n'as pas cent balles?' or something to that effect, I thought it a bit curious that he'd ask for 100 euros but in fact he was asking for 100 'old' francs, which would translate into roughly 25 eurocents.

You have to do the Dr Evil voice when reading those denominations aloud

I still really want to get a few bags full of Zimbabwean notes and use it to wallpaper a room one day. You'd think that would be easy living in a country right next to them..

Guinea is working is way up there slowly but steadily. We are at $1 = 7249.95 franc. And you basically spend it at the same value. It's time to reset a large part of Africa.

Doesn't the franc have a fixed conversion rate with the euro ?

Oh ok I see, that's the real Guinea you're talking about, not one of the other Guineas. Do you know the reason why Guinea doesn't just use CFA francs ?

Anyone got a spare 1Trillion note they could send me?

You can just buy some on eBay.

I once made a wager (which I lost) with a friend for "a million dollars" as a joke, but then found that you can just buy trillions (at the time) of zimbabwean dollars easily, so I bought some and delivered :) Funnily, they sell it on eBay at a price higher than their exchange rate (and that's excluding shipping).

Doesn't that allow an arbitrage situation, where you can buy Zimbabwe dollars through official channels and then sell them on E-bay for more than they cost you? Or maybe the "official" exchange rate is depressed through shortages and risk in completing the transaction.

I think supply/demand may get in the way: not that many people need zimbabwean dollars, just some collectors and those who seek them for novelty value. Market will become saturated pretty quickly.

There are also websites that try and pump up the currencies as get rich schemes.[1]

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/2gzafs/spou...

>Funnily, they sell it on eBay at a price higher than their exchange rate

Doing the opposite of that would mean a man delivering letters with money in them with nothing in return. Sounds too philanthropic, especially when we're talking about money here.

I haven't thought about it this way, this actually makes sense. Insane margins threw me off.

There's a shop near my office here in Hong Kong that sells 100 Trillion Zimbabwean notes (amongst other old notes, coins, jewelry, etc). I bought quadrillion worth, although I guess it's worth a bit less now :)

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152998973018758&l=...

They need to use exponential notations! 10^20.

Yugoslavia also had huge hyperinflation in the 90s - http://www.rogershermansociety.org/yugoslavia.htm

Between October 1, 1993 and January 24, 1995 prices increased by 5 quadrillion percent. That’s a 5 with 15 zeroes after it.

Zimbabwe. A prime use case for Bitcoin?

"At the height of the country’s economic crisis, Zimbabweans had to carry plastic bags bulging with banknotes to buy basic goods. Prices were rising at least twice a day."

Bitcoin is often cited as being volatile. Its never been anywhere near as volatile as that ^ (at least not in the last 2 years)

Zimbabwe. A prime use case for Japanese yen?

"At the height of the country’s economic crisis, Zimbabweans had to carry plastic bags bulging with banknotes to buy basic goods. Prices were rising at least twice a day."

Japanese yen is often cited as being volatile. Its never been anywhere near as volatile as that ^ (at least not in the last 2 years)

The Yen is volatile? Except for the last two years, there hasnt been any valuation change for a decade.

When I went in 2008 it was 100 yen to a dollar almost exactly, made the conversation rate dead easy. 100 yen is now worth 80¢. That change was entirely US based?

From 1995 to 2012 Japanese inflation was essentially zero: http://www.inflation.eu/inflation-rates/japan/historic-infla...

> Zimbabwe. A prime use case for Bitcoin?

As is well known and is mentioned in the article, what they actually used was other countries' currencies. Namely the South African Rand and the US Dollar. South Africa is the economically largest neighbour, and is stable by comparison. The US Dollar is the "global reserve".

Yeah, all the poor people without access to electricity would love Bitcoin.

Not even just poor people, almost all people have trouble getting electricity there. Of course, excluding the politically connected and powerful.

</used_to_live_there>

Most people in Zimbabwe have electricity. Zimbabwe has 97% mobile penetration: http://afkinsider.com/20015/report-zimbabwe-has-97-mobile-pe... Last time I checked their phones didn't run on magic, but on electricity :) And all you need to use Bitcoin is a cellphone (a $20 smartphone).

(No I am not seriously suggesting Zimbabwe uses Bitcoin. I am just pointing out you seem to incorrectly think all people in African countries live in huts or something.)

> Most people in Zimbabwe have electricity. ... you seem to incorrectly think all people in African countries live in huts

I know people who live in good houses in affluent parts of one of the largest cities in South Africa, and they don't have electricity 24/7 http://loadshedding.eskom.co.za/loadshedding/description.

You don't need to have electricity 24/7 everywhere, you only need it in one place in a village for few hours so that everyone can get their phones charged on a regular basis.

There are exceptions to every rule, in Zimbabwe you could have 24/7 electricity and a fibre optic internet connection in some areas, and I can't even get fibre to my place in South Africa.

It's quite likely your friend uses a generator or inverter. It is quite likely 24/7.

Load shedding's occurrences have also only been something more recent (past few months).

Generators are still fairly rare in the suburbs. Load shedding has been in SA for several years now.

It's been there for several years conceptually as a plan to deal with limited capacity. Meaning it comes and goes.

For the good part of the last 3 years it's hardly been there (so unnoticeable one would probably say power is hardly/never cut). Its just been more impactful in the past few months & the last few months of last year.

Generators/Inverters aren't rare in the suburbs or in the further outlying areas. At least not anymore. Not everyone, but one could hear someone else's close by/a neighbors.

More like a prime use case for foreign currency. Most affluent people in Zimbabwe use South African Rand or US Dollars to conduct busies.

Most everybody. The Zim dollar is not legal tender any more; it's not printed any more. This is just the bank trying to get rid of its reserves.

Sometimes Botswana Pula and Zambian Kwatsha are also used (esp. near the borders) but ATMs dispense USD.

They say quadrillion; shouldn't this be quintillion?

No, quadrillion in the common short scale:

  35,000 = thousand
  35,000,000 = million
  35,000,000,000 = billion
  35,000,000,000,000 = trillion
  35,000,000,000,000,000 = quadrillion

In the long scale, this would be a "thousand billion" (or apparently also a "billiard" according to wikipedia), so not a quintillion there either.

It boils down to denoting thousands of thousands, not just the raw number of triplet zeros in the number.

It probably doesn't help that education systems in countries like Zimbabwe is barely able to teach basic numerical skills to a large part of their population.

(I don't want to imply this is necessarily the case in Zimbabwe, or everywhere in Africa, but I've heard in some MOOC that people in developing countries tend to have numerical problems with prices)

Unless the standard's changed in the years, we (South Africans) view Zimbabweans as having a very good education system, extending to math literacy. Perhaps that view might be biased as most of the Zimbabweans we would be exposed to (or any other country really) would be the 'cream of the crop' due to the best and able affording to get scholarships to study in other countries.

BTW, I'm 25, so I'm talking about things that I've seen in varsity from 7 years back to this day where I interact with varsity students.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com