INFLATION PANIC: Country Behind the $100,000,000,000,000 Bill Hits Terrible, New Low

This is an economic lesson for the Democrats. Printing money is the road to ruin.

It started in the early 2000s, when the government of then-President Robert Mugabe printed ever more money…..

….businesses have started printing their own “money”—scraps of paper, sometimes handwritten, that customers can use to pay for future purchases. Others are handing out change in-kind, making customers whole with juice boxes, pens or slices of cheese.

The Country Behind the $100,000,000,000,000 Bill Hits a New Stage of Dysfunction

Zimbabweans don’t trust local currency and there isn’t enough U.S. cash to make change, so vendors issue their own on scraps of paper

By: By Gabriele Steinhauser and Bernard Mpofu, Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2023:

HARARE, Zimbabwe—On a recent afternoon, Rutendo Manyowa handed over a U.S. $5 bill to pay for her $3.50 order of chicken, fries and a soft drink at a popular fast-food joint in the Zimbabwean capital. But instead of a $1 bill and two quarters in change, the cashier handed Ms. Manyowa three slips of paper, bearing the restaurant’s name and the amount of money she could use to buy her next meal.

Zimbabwe, the country that brought the world the one-hundred-trillion-dollar bill, has reached a new stage of monetary dysfunction. Because of a lack of small change, businesses have started printing their own “money”—scraps of paper, sometimes handwritten, that customers can use to pay for future purchases. Others are handing out change in-kind, making customers whole with juice boxes, pens or slices of cheese.

The paper chits and other pecuniary workarounds are the latest products of two decades of extreme mismanagement of Zimbabwe’s currency.

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