Seriously, I would like to get a couple of the $500million notes as a collectable.  Anyone know where I can get it?

Stalin and Mao (left-wing socialism) did not inherit inflation, but they killed at least ninety-five million people between them, mostly by starvation after government take-over of private farms.

Is ‘Economic History’ taught in Zimbabwe? Does anyone in the Zimbabwe government have a degree in neo-classical Economics, instead of Marxist economics?

is the one to use – it works fine here.

Someone should buy up mdczimbabwe.com and mdczw.org as these are seemingl available, and point them to the MDC site so people don’t get lost – I can never remember which one it is!

Check out this link. If you have a slow connection, then these are the four steps:
Type in Zimbabwe
Click somewhere on the applet to “get it to focus”
Squint and look top right and select “past year”
Squint and look bottom right and chose “time”
Wait a little – it is doing a big search
And you will see the press coverage for Zimbabwe as a bar chart. Mmmm, which is going up faster – the currency or the press coverage? Well maybe the currency wins but the press coverage ain’t bad.

Why do people choose to use this currency in place of, say, batteries or matches or cigarettes. Just about anything can be used as a unit of exchange as long as it is numerous and uniform and is perceived to be of value to someone somewhere. That’s why prison economies (and some refugee camps in the Congo apparently) work with cigarettes as a unit of exchange, while much of West Africa and other parts of the world functioned fine on cowrie shells for centuries (which had to be fetched from the Indian Ocean and had value as jewellery).

Seriously, someone could define a cut-off date (say, the expiry date of the current notes) as the date beyond which all payments move to some new medium of exchange. It’s a consensus thing, rather like saying who the government is. Perhaps even an on-line medium based on the systems people use to send telephone airtime and fuel home, with some physical token as equivalent. That would create a virtual Zimbabwean economy well beyond the borders of the country, and linked to where the wealth generation now is.

Gideon Gono quote: “The country is standing on the edge of a cliff which threatens to irreversibly take us downhill if we do not boldly move forward with speed to address most of our shortcomings.” Yes, well, er, how about:
Old habits die hard.

And I don’t think that would be enough for a crumb of bread now, let alone a slice.

But don’t worry – Mbeki worships Mugabe for these rampant successes.  In the same way that Zim money has no meaning any more, I think the English language no longer has words that adequately describe these two cretins.