Zimbabwe Business Watch : Week 4
January 19th, 2009
A number of large manufacturers may stay closed indefinitely whilst others extend their Christmas shutdown. This is largely due to unworkable nature of the business environment rather than orders and demand for goods. Wages and salaries paid cannot be spent by employees to provide for their households. Many of the day to day inputs of companies cannot be obtained as virtually everything is priced in forex and many organizations still await their Forex Trading Licenses. In the meantime, they survive by transacting illegally, facing potential jail sentences.
Government has more or less declared all embarrassing statistics National Secrets, and it is anyone’s guess precisely what the state of play is at any one time. There have been no official statistcs for over 4 months now. It is reliably estimated that inflation is now over 6 million percent per month! Old Mutual was delaying dividend payments to Zimbabweans because the country’s banking system could not process the zeroes involved in the transaction.
January 20th, 2009 11:43
Could we have a picture of the famous 100 trillion dollar bill, pretty please?
I am asking because, when (if?) it rolls off the printing press it will make it into the Guinness Book of Records as the banknote with the most noughts in mankind’s history. So far the champion is the yugoslav 500 billion note:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:500000000000_dinars.jpg
January 27th, 2009 04:52
Hungary had bigger denomination banknote in 1946, but yes, they do not print all the zeros, rather it just prints so many quadrillion, quintillion etc.
Germany (1923) also do not print all the zeros
Yugoslavia 500 billion (1993 Or 94), prints all the zeros.