Banknotes

The reserve bank of Zimbabwe has announced the release of yet another new series of banknotes,this after slashing 12 zeros from the currency. This came after releasing no less than seven new notes in January alone - namely a 20 and 50 billion as well as 1, 10, 20, 50 and finally 100 Trillion Dollar notes in late January.

This would make the third time in around six months that the ailing Zimbabwean currency has been devalued, only to soar to unimaginable highs again in a matter of months.

Zimbabwe might be a political, humanitarian and economical minefield but numismatists are having a field day as we are seeing the release of new banknotes on virtually a fortnightly basis at this stage. The new notes consist of a 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 500 Zimbabwean Dollars. The latest 100 Trillion note being equal to the new 100 dollar under the new plan as central bank governor Gideon Gono slashed another 12 zeros from the unit. The ‘old’ notes will circulate alongside the new revalued ones until 30 June 2009.

The move came as a bit of a surprise to most as the southern African country announced just a week prior that foreign currencies including the South African Rand, U.S. Dollar, Euro, Pound and most SADC currencies were to be accepted as legal tender in the country. Gono is considered to be the worlds worst central banker and was recently quoted as saying that he was vindicated by God, viz a vie the world economic slowdown, and that the rest of the world should merely follow his example and print more money.

The Zimbabwean collapse has been laid at the feet of that country’s president, Robert Mugabe, whose disasterous land reform policies saw the country turn from a major exporter of food stuffs to a failed state in the midsts of an epic humanitarian crisis.

The cause of the flood of banknote issues is the hyperinflation that the country experiences. The last official data released by the Zimbabwean reserve bank put the inflation rate at just under 250 million percent in July last year. However Steve H. Hanke, a Professor of Applied Economics with The Johns Hopkins University and Senior Fellow at The Cato Institute, has calculated that the number is set at 89.7 Sextillion percent as of 14 November 2008. In case you were wondering sextillion is written with 21 zeros(10²¹ ) or as 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000% annualized inflation.

The new notes all share security features including a color-shift stripe with the letters RBZ, a color-shift Zimbabwe bird on the left side as well as see through chevrons on either side that are in perfect register.