Practitioners of notaphily (they can’t touch you for it) may have purchased for their collections an example of the $50m banknote issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe under the benevolent rule of Robert Mugabe; if so, it will have been the sole transaction in which that worthless piece of paper acquired any value. We may have had our troubles with the global downturn in 2008, but in that year the inflation rate in Zimbabwe passed 100,000 per cent.
Of course, people might say, that happened in an undeveloped economy governed by an extreme nationalist dictator, on a different continent. Very true; but on our own continent, under a democratic government in Weimar Germany, people ended up being paid twice daily, to keep pace with hyperinflation, had to take a wheelbarrow full of currency to the pub even if they had no intention of standing a round, and ended up burning banknotes to keep themselves warm.
