Zimbabwe-everyone is a millionaire here. It is the only country where you can easily find bills like 200 000, 500 000, 10 000 000 000 dollars. for example the simple toilet paper costs here 278 000 Zimbabwe dollars. a loaf of bread costs a million Zimbabwe dollars, a newspaper costs two million, and a decent joint of beef costs a hundred million.
This all began in the year 2000, when president Mugabe came to power and transformed the whole country into a giant agricultural field. At least they can take pride in the fact that they have the highest denomination bills in the world. The only problem is that the average wage is 20 million dollars a month. They’re called Mugabe dollars and it isn’t a term of affection.Everyone queues here: in the supermarkets, at the petrol stations and in the banks, in order to draw out the money to buy anything.Due to the country’s hyperinflation rate of over 231,000,000% a year, the financial authorities were forced to release larger and larger bills in order to help people buy the simplest things without carrying bricks of bills with them.
When the $10,000,000 bill was released early this year, it was worth about $4 US, but it soon became as worthless as the previous bills and now you can find the 100 billion dollars bill which you can use to buy 3 eggs. When people want to go to a restaurant they are again forced to carry mountains of money with them. 500 million note, just printed in May 2008…..everybody can have it….maybe just nice for 1 breakfast/lunch (equal to about USD 2).Now the inflation is through the roof, 80% of the population is unemployed and a third of the population has left the country
