The enormity of Zimbabwe’s inflation

There are at least 2 crazy passages in this article about the amount of inflation in Zimbabwe over the past 30 years.

Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia, was a quadrillion times worse than it was in Weimar Germany.

In grade school, quadrillion was always an exaggeration but not here:

The cumulative devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar was such that a stack of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (26 zeros) two dollar bills (if they were printed) in the peak hyperinflation would have be needed to equal in value what a single original Zimbabwe two-dollar bill of 1978 had been worth. Such a pile of bills literally would be light years high, stretching from the Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy.

Andromeda Galaxy! It’s our nearest galactic neighbor but still 2,500,000 light-years away. (via daveg)

• economics
• money
• Zimbabwe