I Want to buy Some Zimbabwe Money

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article about how the German company that has been supplying Zimbabwe with the paper required to print their worthless currency has stopped shipments.

The Munich-based company that has supplied Zimbabwe with the special blank sheets to print its increasingly worthless dollar caved in to pressure on Tuesday from the German government for it to stop doing business with the African ruler.

Mr. Mugabe's regime relies on a steady supply of the paper -- fortified with watermarks and other antiforgery features -- to print the bank notes that allow it to pay the soldiers and other loyalists who enable him to stay in power. With an annual inflation rate estimated at well over 1 million percent, new notes with ever more zeros need to be printed every few weeks because the older ones lose their worth so quickly.

Anti-forgery features? What's the point? Who in Zimbabwe can afford the equipment to forge the notes? Who has the ink required to print the things? And once you do forge the money, what do you do with it? There's nothing in the stores to buy. Amazing.

Here's why I want some Zimbabwe currency. It's a piece of history, like Confederate money or money from the old German Weimar Republic.

Zimbabwe's central bank stopped posting inflation figures in January, when it stood at a relatively modest 100,580%. A loaf of bread costs 30 billion Zimbabwean dollars.

Here's another great bit.

Vending machines, which take coins, fell out of service in Zimbabwe years ago. A single soda would require the deposit of billions of coins. Imported from South Africa and in very short supply, a Coke sells on the black market for around 15 billion Zimbabwean dollars.

This can be yours for only $15,000,000,000Z!
I started watching Zimbabwe a long time ago on the Internet, before Mugabe kicked the white farmers off their land, back when Zimbabwe was a decently performing country. I used to read the newspaper excerpts on AllAfrica.com. Mugabe, for a variety of reasons, decided to punish the people who were successful, scapegoating them for his problems and focusing on them because they were inheritors of the oppressive whites of the past. He took their property and gave it to the "oppressed", really his thuggish supporters. The end result: a can of Coke costs $15B.

Hmmm. Punish the successful white oppressors. Does that sound like anyone's spiritual advisor?