Monday, June 16, 2008

Easy money if you can get it?

Ahh business and capitalism!
That this House notes that inflation has exceeded 100,000 per cent. in Zimbabwe and further notes the misery this is causing for the people of that country; therefore deplores the conduct of the Munich-based company Giesecke & Devrient in producing Zimbabwean currency which is being used to maintain the Mugabe regime; praises the independent action of South African trades unions who arranged a boycott of a ship carrying arms for the Mugabe regime; and hopes that similar unilateral action will cause Giesecke & Devrient to cease the printing of money for Mugabe's evil regime.
A question has arisen for me though, what currency are Zimbabwe paying for their currency in?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Zim has plenty of Dollars, Euros and Pounds Sterling. Well, ZANU-PF does, anyway. ;o)

Anonymous said...

I believe the regime have been forcefully converting individual overseas remittances into the worthless Zim currency, helping to pep its foreign currency reserves

Anonymous said...

Reminds me of when I was working at Standard Chartered Bank in Zaire - the money was so worthless that noone bothered to pick it up if you dropped it in the street.

Anonymous said...

The Germans have some experience of printing worthless, vastly inflated currency.

Anonymous said...

Question to the Dizzy-reading brethren (& indeed to Mr Dizzy hisself):

Has the Zim thing been the biggest inflationary event in economic history?
100,000% seems fairly high.

Anonymous said...

I think the post-WWII Hungarian inflation is still just about the record holder

Anonymous said...

I live near their offices, I'm going to go and have a nip down and see what sort of place it is.prinzregentstr is very posh

Anonymous said...

They will be getting paid in hard currency. My sister used to work for a competitor many years ago and I remember her telling me that the banknote printers rarely had problems getting paid - even by the worst basket-case economies.