I saw Nik of the www.twistedkites.co.uk blog in London today and he referred to the hyper inflation in Zimbabwe. So here is a picture for Nik – one bottle of beer and the four stacks of 500 Zim$ notes required to buy the one bottle! The beer cost 1 million Zim$ (about 17 pence) each stack of 500 Zim$ dollar notes is a quarter of a million dollars! However, all this was last week so you’d probably need a fifth stack of notes if you wanted the same beer today.

One bottle of beer is not normally enough for me and I suspect the effort of carrying enough money around to buy a few bottles would make me more thirsty. However, unless I saved up I couldn’t buy more than 5 bottles a day because 5 million Zim$ is the limit the banks put on cash withdrawls per day – they are printing the money like there’s no tomorrow (there probably wont be!) but can’t print it fast enough so there is a shortage of banknotes. Forget debit/credit cards, to all intents and purposes, they don’t exist in any meaningful way.