The idea that a nation's inflation rate can exceed 100% has never even crossed my mind until today, when I read that Zimbabwe's had reached 2,200,000% on the 16th of July. Meaning, if this goes on for a year, Z$2.2M will become Z$1 at the end. That may be worse than Turkey's old Lira before they revalued it about a decade or more ago.
According to Wikipedia, at independence in 1980, the Zimbabwean dollar was valued at about US$1. Then in January 2008... ZING! US$1 was Z$2.5M. The best quote was "By July 4th, 2008 at 5PM, a bottle of beer cost $100 billion Zimbabwean dollars, but an hour later, the price had gone up to $150 billion; the Los Angeles Times further reported on July 15th, 2008 that the printing presses were running out of paper to print the money..."
LOL! Fuck! They'll never even print Z$1000 now because it'll be cheaper to wipe your ass with those notes than to buy toilet paper. And they had just revalued their dollar about 3 years ago! A local one-thousand-dollar-job's Zimbabwean counterpart is a several-million-dollar-job. Who wants to be a millionaire? Heck, I'll be a billionaire if I go there.
In fact, on the 19th of July, they've announced their release of Z$100,000,000,000 notes. That's eleven zeros, twelve digits and is also known as hundred billion dollars. Zimbabwean. That was following a report on June 20th that the estimated inflation rate for the year will be 9M%. Reminds me of those times when I saw people describing Africa as the shithole of the world. Now I realize that they probably were trying to describe accurately.
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