Tuesday, April 6, 2010

A Little Perspective

Shocking Pictures which show an example of the Zimbabwe financial crisis in 2000. The inflation was at 231 million %! I thought this would go nicely with what we are reading in the book. The website can be found here.
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4 comments:

  1. DanaApril 6, 2010 at 12:27 PM

    this is absolutely crazy! I'm wondering though how was the government of Zimbabwe able to just "devalue" the currency and take away 10 zeros?

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  2. tcmtApril 6, 2010 at 1:34 PM

    While I was studying abroad I made a trip to Zimbabwe (in late 2008). The money was a giant joke basically and vendors were selling them as tourist items. No vendor or government agency would take the local currency and everyone was demanding South African Rands but they demanded American Dollars from me, so I got pretty ripped off sometimes. The most interesting thing to me was that the money I saw had an expiration date on it and there were maximum withdrawal limits at all the banks so by the time you could get your money out of the bank it was essentially valueless.

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  3. Adam ManixApril 6, 2010 at 2:49 PM

    That story is crazy, it is wild to think how much different money is handled in Zimbabwe and how skewed economic standards are.

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  4. BryanApril 8, 2010 at 9:28 AM

    It is interesting to me to see how the people reacted to this situation(if you were to look at the entire timeline after the currency debasement). I think it says something about expectation and confidence that consumers hold. As soon as the situation worsened the people all became frenzied and so worried about the value of the currency. The hyperinflation that took place may not have exceeded at such a high rate if people had not been leaving work every ten minutes to take money out or make purchases. Because they were so worried about what their earnings would buy at the end of the day people stopped working and were literally waiting at banks. This threw off the entire market and people were expecting this inflation to continue. Their expectations helped make this true and consumer confidence was thrown out the window. People as whole seem to often be so emotionally unstable when it comes to financial confidence.

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