Blogs > Cliopatria > Zimbabwe Channels Carl Sagan

Jul 30, 2008

Zimbabwe Channels Carl Sagan


by Cliopatria


The BBC announces that shortly after issuing a 100 billion dollar bill, Zimbabwe's Central Bank is going to try and deal with the country's catastrophic inflation by lopping a couple of zeros off the next round of notes. This means we'll probably have to wait a bit to see a trillion-dollar bill.

Anybody out there know the largest denomination bill issued during a round of hyperinflation? (Let's keep it to the 20th and 21st centuries.) Has Zimbabwe already won?

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Timothy B Abbott - 7/30/2008

Not yet. Yugoslavia had a 500 Billion dinar note in the early 1990s. According to http://www.answers.com/topic/hyperinflation, Hungary has the distinction of the largest ever banknote officially released in circulation: the 1946 100 quintillion pengő note(that's 100,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 10 to the twentieth power)!