“…What comes after a trillion?..”
A cigarette?
There’s really only 5 numbers.
None
One
Few
Many
Lots
Most numbers are equal to one, if you’re perspicacious enough to choose your system of units correctly.
(Besides, it’s just a constant factor.)
When I was in the Congo (then Zaire) near the end of Mobutu’s rule, I paid a million zaires for a bottle of beer. This was worth about a dollar US. (I still have a couple of million-zaire notes.)
My first rule of economics: If you have to be a millionaire to buy a bottle of beer, your country is fucked.
Looks like you might have to be a quadrillionaire to buy a beer in Zimbabwe.
Sadly, for those of us who enjoy hiliariously large denominations of currency if not for the Zimbabweans, it looks like they have reset the currency. XE.com reports a current exchange rate of 361 ZWD to 1 USD.
What comes after a trillion…
a trillion and one.
D’uh
So that means the OP is a trillionaire even in US dollars ($2.77 trillion). Of course, those bills are probably invalidated by the currency change (but how do they make sure that nobody tries to use one to buy something, or use the correct conversion factor to the new money, and they probably have to ensure they are still valid so people don’t end up with useless bills, until some time has passed)?
By printing up new currency that doesn’t look like the old currency. The old currency can continue to circulate at the old value for as long as people still have it, assuming they can find someone willing to take their old trillions and such, but it won’t be confused for the more valuable new currency as long as the new currency looks different.
The thing to do in the past (Turkey, Argentina, Romania) was to just chop of some zeroes (6, 13, and 5, respectively) and call it a new currency. But AFAIK, Zimbabwe just gave up and everyone uses US dollars, South African rand, etc.
It was fun watching my liras ($1 million bill?) go from 60 cents to 12 cents to a fraction of a cent.
I found a good explanation of what happened to devalue their currency here:
http://www.forextraders.com/forex-analysis/forex-fundamental-analysis/currency-devaluation-examples.html
Basically, they chopped 13 zeros off the currency, and set $1 = $Z6000. The way I calculate it, what you have there was worht approx. $0.016 in 2008. Since the current rate is $1 = $Z342, they must have devalued it again (or somehow they reigned in the inflation and caused deflation…
I thought they weren’t using the Zimbabwean dollar anymore, just currency of other countries.
Curious. Wikipedia agrees with you, so I’m not sure what’s up with the XE exchange rate.
What comes after a trillion
The tax collector.
It’s either a Buffetillion or a Kochillion. I’m never sure.
I am no expert, but aren’t most people in Britain more familiar with the “American” (short) scale for their day-to-day use?
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You are quite correct, and I am considering writing a stiff email to the people in chacoguy’s link as part of the ongoing quest to stamp out this misconception.
Yet.
I was there the year before. IIRC even then they were using Z$1 coins as tokens in the casino at Victoria Falls. I still have a few of them lying around. Never saw a penny though. Looking at the coins the smallest I remember seeing was a 50c.
Sergeant Detritus? Is that you?
I still remember the pictures in my high school history textbook talking about hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, and people literally sweeping deutchmarks off the street or using them as wallpaper.