A plague

The picture is from The Times

The suffering of Zimbabwe's people continues – and worsens. The Infectious Diseases Hospital, about five miles south of Harare on the pockmarked highway to South Africa, is the only government hospital still open in the capital. Between five and 15 cholera fatalities arrive at its mortuary every day.


"It's well past time for Robert Mugabe to leave," Condoleezza Rice, the outgoing secretary of state, said on Friday. "I think that is now obvious.
"If this is not evident for the international community, that it is time to stand up for what is right, I don't know what would be."
Miss Rice, speaking on a trip to Denmark, said it was up to Zimbabwe's neighbours to take action. "Frankly the nations of the region have to lead it," she said. "Southern African states should be the most responsible."
The country's cholera epidemic has given new impetus to condemnations of Mr Mugabe, who retains the presidency despite coming second in the last contested election, in March.

Hyper Inflation

Inflation in Zimbabwe is rising so rapidly that a new means of measuring it has had to be invented.

Steve Hanke, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, and an expert in exchange rates and inflation, has developed the Hanke Hyperinflation Index for Zimbabwe (HHIZ).

Given the non-existence of government statistics for the money supply and the unreliability of its inflation statistics, it uses market-based price data instead to calculate the figure. As of this week, the HHIZ showed inflation in Zimbabwe was 2 trillion per cent a year.

Two trillion percent. I can't write that as a number because I'm not sure how many zeros to use. Because I read this in The Telegraph I'm assuming they are using the non-American definition of trillion which has 18 zeros after the figure and is known in the US as a quintillion. A US trillion is known in the rest of the world as a billion.

The highest inflation in the world, ever, was post-war Hungary, where it reached 4.19 quintillion per cent.

In August last year the Zimbabwe government knocked 10 zeros off its currency.

Zimbabwe - hyper inflation

The press is always going on about Zimbabwe having an inflation rate of 200,000%

It's hard to understand what numbers like that mean.

2 days ago I tried a currency calculation on XE.com

It gave 1USD worth $4,952,500,000.00 ZW Dollars.

Today I tried it again.

1 USD now = 6,718,055,555.56 ZW dollars.

That's a drop of nearly 2 Billion dollars in just 2 days. the currency is devaluing at the rate of 1 Billion dollars a day.

Try it yourself and see how much its fallen since this post.

It's abit of a worry since my parents still live there.