http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-f...

Defaulting on all Euro debts, exiting Europe, bankrupting the banks, issuing a new currency is a viable solution. Yes it's a horrible hang over to live through but it means removing the horrendous debt burden for the next 50 years. See how Greece is having trouble with every IMF payment in the past few months? If the EU has its way Greece will continue paying chunks of cash like those for decades to come. Better to burn everything down and start over. They might even pick up some Russian and Chinese financial support along the way.

If they do not tend the root of the problems, they might as well do this every 50 years. Things like 14th month payments (while it was a thing) or tax evasions that could reach industrial levels on their own will make things hard, even without the IMF or EU interfering.

There is always the danger that Greece will say "to Hell with it," print money to fund their expenditures, and get hyperinflation. But that's a level of mismanagement even worse than Greece has shown in the past.

"floating to", "floating with", "floating against" is a minefield.

Germans have to work to 69 now and get less than the average Greek retiree.

One hundred trillion dollars of Zimbabwe.

50 million marks of between wars Germany.

Some millions of Turkish lira.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...

It had gotten so bad that they didn't even bother printing new stamps; they'd just overprint the new value on the old stamp in black ink.

You are right, this cleansing is only within their borders...

Brilliant country with a lot of potential. Psychotic leadership - it's far worse and more violent than a lot of people realise. (As in - throwing dissenters down mine shafts violent.)

The West is partly to blame. Mugabe and Zanu-PF aren't going anywhere while Zim remains a cheap under-the-counter source of diamonds and minerals.

Rhodesia was run as a segregationist society on ever level. But if you want to change that, you don't just wall off the people, throw a knife in the pit, and declare that the strongest survive. Which is exactly what we did. Both sides were forced to wage all kinds of guerilla warfare in an attempt to survive. It is no surprise that a brutal, corrupt leader like Mugabe emerged. They were the only ones that would survive such a challenge.

Rhodesia was a productive state with a developed economy. After Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, decades of progress was undone. The new regime essentially just looted the country for themselves. Everyone there is worse off now! Worse yet, the segregation of blacks was just replaced with the segregation of whites via 'land redistribution' schemes.

We print and waste an enormous amount of money compared to other countries that don't have that luxury.

Printing money doesn't necessarily mean inflation is going to happen. There are so many factors involved, and the fact of the matter is the market cares about other things more than supply.

Inflation is trivial to cause. Deflation takes a bit more work and discipline, and is subject to the requirement that economic growth exceed increase in money supply - but the method behind it is well understood.

The challenge is to keep your inflation at a low, reasonable level - say 3-5%. I don't think anybody has figured out a repeatable method to do that.

That we can cause inflation at will (pretty much universally agreed); that we can cause deflation with a bit of discipline/rigor (the mechanism for this is well understood as well); or that we are unable to reliably maintain a persistent low positive inflation rate (There is a Nobel prize for you if you have a guaranteed formula for that).

LOL. Come to Japan and see for yourself if prices don't rise. Your comment is a big lie.

The value of the yen has dropped something like 33% compared to the dollar (went from $1 = 100 to $1 = 140 in the past 3 years) but yearly CPI increases have never hit above 2 or 3 percent.

Prices have gone up, but mainly due to the sales tax increase, not due to QE. Considering that CPI is almost definitionally linked to inflation, I feel that it's a pretty good indicator of lack of real inflation.

PS: I noticed you have been in Japan for like 3 years. I have been here for 8 years. I guess some experience counts as well.

In the first QE rounds by the US after the 2008 recession hit, money was being printed to basically end up in bank's coffers, but lending didn't go up correspondingly, so the actual amount of money in circulation didn't really change.

I think the big reason for the link being weaker than expected is that it's the money actually in circulation ( in the "being used" sense) that matters, not the amount of money in existence. It's all just numbers, after all, and if you're not doing anything with them, it's the same as if it doesn't exist.

As an interesting aside, US pennies minted before 1982 contain $0.018 worth of copper. It's not nearly the problem that Zimbabwe has, because pennies makes up so little of the US currency in circulation. But one might think an enterprising entrepreneur could profit from this. But again the problem falls to inefficiencies of scale: you simply can't harvest and sort enough pennies quickly enough to make the effort worthwhile (machinery even exists for this purpose).

Curiously, the eBay price is higher now than it was then ($34 vs. $6.25). So they'll be back to being worth a trillion in about ... 185 million years at the current rate of increase.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jun/23/zimbabwean-cann...

Notes are US, but coins are South African rands.

Tourists from the USA should bring $1 coins and leave $1 notes at home, people don't like the notes as they get dirty.

Ecuador mints coins (1, 5, 10, 25, 50¢) which are the same shape as US ones, and interchangeable in Ecuador.

So, there I was, getting money from the ATM, thinking I had hit the jackpot :)

In France something similar happened, one day a poor man came up to me and asked me 'Tu n'as pas cent balles?' or something to that effect, I thought it a bit curious that he'd ask for 100 euros but in fact he was asking for 100 'old' francs, which would translate into roughly 25 eurocents.

Oh ok I see, that's the real Guinea you're talking about, not one of the other Guineas. Do you know the reason why Guinea doesn't just use CFA francs ?

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152998973018758&l=...

I once made a wager (which I lost) with a friend for "a million dollars" as a joke, but then found that you can just buy trillions (at the time) of zimbabwean dollars easily, so I bought some and delivered :) Funnily, they sell it on eBay at a price higher than their exchange rate (and that's excluding shipping).

Doing the opposite of that would mean a man delivering letters with money in them with nothing in return. Sounds too philanthropic, especially when we're talking about money here.

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/2gzafs/spou...

Between October 1, 1993 and January 24, 1995 prices increased by 5 quadrillion percent. That’s a 5 with 15 zeroes after it.

"At the height of the country’s economic crisis, Zimbabweans had to carry plastic bags bulging with banknotes to buy basic goods. Prices were rising at least twice a day."

Bitcoin is often cited as being volatile. Its never been anywhere near as volatile as that ^ (at least not in the last 2 years)

"At the height of the country’s economic crisis, Zimbabweans had to carry plastic bags bulging with banknotes to buy basic goods. Prices were rising at least twice a day."

Japanese yen is often cited as being volatile. Its never been anywhere near as volatile as that ^ (at least not in the last 2 years)

(No I am not seriously suggesting Zimbabwe uses Bitcoin. I am just pointing out you seem to incorrectly think all people in African countries live in huts or something.)

I know people who live in good houses in affluent parts of one of the largest cities in South Africa, and they don't have electricity 24/7 http://loadshedding.eskom.co.za/loadshedding/description.

Load shedding's occurrences have also only been something more recent (past few months).

For the good part of the last 3 years it's hardly been there (so unnoticeable one would probably say power is hardly/never cut). Its just been more impactful in the past few months & the last few months of last year.

Generators/Inverters aren't rare in the suburbs or in the further outlying areas. At least not anymore. Not everyone, but one could hear someone else's close by/a neighbors.

</used_to_live_there>

Sometimes Botswana Pula and Zambian Kwatsha are also used (esp. near the borders) but ATMs dispense USD.

As is well known and is mentioned in the article, what they actually used was other countries' currencies. Namely the South African Rand and the US Dollar. South Africa is the economically largest neighbour, and is stable by comparison. The US Dollar is the "global reserve".

  35,000 = thousand
  35,000,000 = million
  35,000,000,000 = billion
  35,000,000,000,000 = trillion
  35,000,000,000,000,000 = quadrillion

It boils down to denoting thousands of thousands, not just the raw number of triplet zeros in the number.

(I don't want to imply this is necessarily the case in Zimbabwe, or everywhere in Africa, but I've heard in some MOOC that people in developing countries tend to have numerical problems with prices)

BTW, I'm 25, so I'm talking about things that I've seen in varsity from 7 years back to this day where I interact with varsity students.