Gosh, people send me stuff. Today I discovered a huge windfall. My friend and volunteer moderator DB Stealey sent me 100 TRILLION dollars in the mail today. Here’s a scan of the bank note:
I’m rich! I can fund my own climate research group, I can get that Ferrari! Now all I have to do is convert it to US Dollars…and um…plot like Dr. Evil here.
Oh, wait…
Seems it is worth about $30 in this January 2009 BBC article. Well at least I can buy a nice lunch.
Well, maybe not. McDonalds maybe?
Lessee…what’s the exchange rate today?
Maybe if I hurry, I can still buy a hot dog and a coke at Costco. I wonder why they bother putting a security strip in the banknote?
Well, it’s still worth more than this:
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Happy Friday everybody!
Gee, when I entered 100T into the convertor, it came back with $7859.43. “Do you wanna sell your 100T Zbill for $20.00?”
If you are going to retire, you’re going to play hell finding any dealer to take the Zimbabwe lucky bucks for a set of new Coopers.
I think the point here is that paper money ( fiat currency ) is only a proxy for bartering in real goods, such as food, oil, minerals, machinery, etc. It’s easier to tote around than a bushel of corn or a hundred lbs of iron. Beads anyone?
According to the conversion chart at the link in the article
$100,000,000,000,000.00 Zimbabwe = $7,859.43 US
looks like somebody dropped a couple decimal points when they wrote the article. Still can’t retire on that unless you want to live in a thatch hut, dress in a loin cloth, and eat rice & fish heads the rest of your life. It’s tempting. 🙂
REPLY: I don’t think Dave would have sent it if it was that valuable -A
Well, don’t forget that anybody who does not believe in AGW is in the pocket of Big Oil. I guess this proves it.
Wow even virtual money is worth more than the Zim Dollar:
http://secondlife.com/whatis/currency.php
I wonder if the Second Life GDP in US$ terms is higher than Zimbabwe’s… that would be a sad statement about society.
I’d love to get one of those… any chance of posting directions on how to get one? ( I’m assuming the local money changers at the airports don’t keep a lot of them in stock… )
BTW, while Gold “has issues” as a currency (volatility, low supply, pocket wear, physical shipping, ‘money supply’ controlled by a few countries, etc.) it is a decent yardstick for long term value of other currencies. Through most of history one ounce of gold has bought “one mans fine suit of clothes”.
So if you want to ‘benchmark a currency’ using a gold reference is a decent way to go.
about 1960 something:
Gold: $45 / ounce
Bread: 10 cents / loaf
House: $7000
Car: $1400
Now:
Gold: ~$1100 (roughly 25 x 1960)
Using that ratio:
Bread: $2.44
House: $171,000
Car: $34.222
Given where that particular house was located, this is about the correct price for it today. I pay about that price for bread, and a decent car is about that price. (the baseline was a very nice car in 1960…)
This, BTW, is my personal benchmark for inflation. Some prices I personally know. Stamps rose from 2 cents to a nickel about then too; and it was a great scandal. So 2 x 25 = 50 cents… and the present stamps are 44 cents. (The actual factor is 24.44 so it really is 48 cents. And rising how fast? We now have ‘forever stamps’ so you don’t have to use them all up this month before the rates rise again… )
Not a perfect metric, but not subject to “official fudge” either. (Like when they redefined ‘inflation’ at the national level to ‘get inflation down’…)
Bread, suit, car, home, stamps, gold. Covers a decent set of capital intensive, labor intensive, minerals / resources intensive, agricultural…
The rate has run about 96% value loss in 50 years, or about 2% / year. (Though that is a fairly stupid linear method, the reality is a power function).
So you can figure that over a typical lifetime any “money” you hold WILL become worthless. It’s just slow enough you don’t notice … much…
And some of us older folks would add “HAS ALREADY become worthless”…
Laugh it up! But what do you think the NWO plan for our currencies in their socialist, satanistic, dystopia. Hmmm?
ROFLMAO … Except if you’re Al Gore or his investors.
“Joe (14:36:47) :
You know when your currency is no good ?
When the paper it is written on is worth more.”
Careful – i understand the US one cent has more value in its materials.
Hmmm apparently not as big as the Zim economy:
http://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2009/08/12/the-second-life-economy–second-quarter-2009-in-detail
At US$50 million a month that is $600 million a year, which puts the Second Life economy ahead of Kiribati and behind Grenada:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29
Zimbabwe is still safely ahead of Second Life at US$4.4 billion.
Totally random question. What has happened to Zimbabwe’s temperatures over the last 50 years?
@Xi Chin:
NWO or not, makes no difference. EVERY “fiat money” has this problem with inflation. NO exceptions. Some are slower than others (Swiss Franc, Japanese Yen) but none are “as good as gold”.
The basic problem is a bit of “inside baseball” in economics, but the “short form” is that a government can simply print money and spend it, that dilutes the value of all the existing money stock and so it acts as a “tax” on all holders of money. A tax that requires no vote, has no ‘paper trail’ of advocacy, and that is often not noticed by the folks so taxed. What politician could ever resist that? Not enough money for your pet project? Easy fix, just print some and spend it…
That, btw, was the reason our USA constitution forbids the use of other than precious metals as “money”. Yet another bit of sound advice from our founders that is being tossed in the trash heap via “re-interpretation”…
(There was one sound reason for leaving the Gold Standard under Nixon. The Soviet Russians were the major global supplier of gold, so by holding back, then selling in a big batch, they could whipsaw our economy a little bit. IMHO, the “result” of going off the gold standard was far worse than the “disease” of someone else having control of the gold supply..)
What Has Government Done to Our Money? (PDF) (112 pgs) (Murray N. Rothbard, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Economics)
Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve (Video) (42min)
Anthony, this all looks very funny but it is in fact a big tragedy.
This is all thanks to one of the most effective community organizers the world has ever seen. His experiment has been closely watched by the UK and the UN who saw it as a kind of experiment!
Many leaders from all over the world watched and learned!
The UK that did absolutely nothing when the white farmers who turned Zimbabwe into a prosperous country were murdered and the UN blocked any request for sanctions! Fortunately the IMF was prepared to provide some loans so the people still have money although the paper it’s printed on comes with a higher value.
(Not all the people can afford to have a one trillion dollar note!)
Watch Mugabe meet another talented community organizer who also shares his deep respect for his people and their well being!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1268115/When-tyrants-meet-Mugabe-welcomes-Ahmadinejad-Zimbabwe.html
I am really sorry these guys did not have the opportunity to enjoy a nice Banana Gin
like it was served in Uganda!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8640731.stm
But hey, when the money is good, maybe they have some in the near future.
They really deserve it.
Don’t you love those guys?
I bought 10 of those Zimbabwe trillion dollar bills on Ebay last fall for $10, so I must be pretty good at currency trading if they now worth over $75US.
I keep one over my desk at work to remind me where an economy goes when a gov’t juts prints more money to pay its obligations.
This Zimbabwean is a multi-millionaire: click
As far as I can tell the Zimbabwe dollar was abandoned about a year ago. The currency convertor at coinmill says its exchange rate is valid as of today ($100T ZD = $7800 USD) but evidently it’s only about as good as tree ring proxies and Finnish thermometers.
With the way the currency markets are these days, nobody is safe, maybe this the one area where Zimbawa is the world leader.
A mate of mine was the geologist in a gold mine in Botswana a while back and I went to visit him in late 1998. We took a trip to Zimbabwe to see the Victoria Falls. That was just when thing were starting to go tits up out there.
Meanwhile, Botswana is doing pretty well. They discovered diamonds just after they got independance and it is one of the few African countries not to be totally screwed up by corruption.
The currency in Botswana is the “pula”. It translates as “raindrop”. Something valuable and to be cherished…
Did you say Ferrari, Anthony? I was going to recommend getting yourself a used ENZO, but, unfortunately, your gifted millions would only cover the cost of gasoline for a few minutes. Well, there’s always the “Top Gear” test of the ENZO, and that’s free:
Obama likes it.
Botswana is a fairly nice country, the only problem is that the HIV rate of the population is something north of 25%. I think it is the worst rate in Africa if memory serves.
E.M.Smith (16:15:01) :
Chiefio your example indicates 7.9% compound interest, which is what we have always used to inflate claims in our insurance calculations, and it has served us very well. When you do that, and adjust for population shift etc, any long term trend in catastrophic claims mysteriously disappears. Doesn’t make for a good scare story, though.
OT Did Zeke Hausfather ever come back on your criticism of his comments about Eureka, or can I take your explanation of how GISS fills empty grid cells as definitive?
Is that, seriously, a picture of a pile of rocks on the note?