As currency dies, Zimbabweans will get $5 for 175 quadrillion local dollars

The problem with hyperinflation is that its not just that there is a lot of money printing: If that where the case they could just stop the printing press or slow it down until it matches economic growth or whatever the target inflation rate is and that would be that. That sort of mismanagement is nothing compared to what happens when the actual backing of a currency breaks down. The backing of a fiat currency is legal tender law. It works in 2 primary ways: debt and taxes. Debt creates demand for the currency because people who get themselves in debt become desperate to get more currency otherwise they will lose their assets. Thats a very powerful backing when you consider how much people care about their homes and their businesses and legal tender law captures those things by making all debts public and private settled in legal tender (but not necessarily denominated in it) if there is a dispute arbitrated by the state. There are various other ways this is indirectly achieved but the goal is the same: keep people in debt in the currency of the realm and then their assets will slowly become yours and they will be for ever working to buy them back off of you. Taxation is an obvious source of demand for the currency as it forces people who would otherwise be self reliant by bartering with each other to also buy the state currency to pay taxes on that trade.

In Zimbabwe the government stole all the things and after that its kind of hard to keep people in debt because they no longer fear loosing their things any more and they are kind of hard to tax when you make them dirt poor. So it densest really matter at that point whats printed on the notes they are becoming worthless. Putting higher and higher denominations is something the government had to do to keep the military funded (in order to stay in power) but that just accelerates the process. Price fixing (pointing a gun at people and demanding that they accept this note for that amount of stuff) is not going to work either because even if you can get one of the remaining merchants to accept they wont be able to restock with the devalued money.

It takes a longer time to steal or the stuff or otherwise ground the economy away to nothing when a country is large and there is a lot of wealth production and likely have economic policies that skim the optimal amount of wealth from the general population so that the economy still grows.

A turn around in the currency in my opinion would require a complete restructuring of their economic policy so that people can keep more of what they produce and can start accumulating capital. If they followed the example of the German economic miracle the turn around could be very fast indeed but I dont think its likely that someone like Mugabe would give up even the slightest bit of control in order to help (not continue to crush) the population he rules.

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