Jake Young is a 
Zimbabwe is in the midst of skyrocketing inflation (check out this chart in the Economist), so this story -- while amusing -- is not entirely unexpected:
I had lunch in Mutare yesterday, a town in Zimbabwe on the Mozambique border.To give you a benchmark -- bread is currently over 110 million a loaf; on 22nd April it was 40 million per loaf.
The lunch bill: soup -- 50 million, oxtail -- 600 million, coffee -- 50 million, with no charge for the pink ice cream.
During the meal, one of my mates was drinking beer -- 750ml bottles of Castle Lager (fondly called bombers). He ordered a fifth one, was advised that the price, which when he ordered his first, second, third and fourth ones was 160 million per bottle, had gone up to 340 million per bottle.
Hat-tip: Free Exchange
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
It gets better.
Posted by: david | May 17, 2008 1:00 PM
I've been watching this rather closely. I'm not sure if the exchange rate is a good measure of inflation, but the value of the currency has been dropping about 4% daily (every day 1 USD buys 4% more Zim that the previous day)
That corresponds to inflation of about 165 MILLION PERCENT yearly if the trend continues.
Posted by: Cecil | May 17, 2008 2:23 PM
if white people hadn't colonized zimbabwe this never would have happened (mugabe has a western education remember!).
Posted by: razib | May 17, 2008 2:37 PM
Zimbabwe just introduced a 500million Z$ note, about two weeks after introducing a 250million Z$ note. It's estimated the new half-billion note is, today, adequate to buy two loaves of bread. The last "official" inflation figure was in February: 165,000%. It's clearly much worse than that now, perhaps (as mentioned above) in the millions?
If it is in the millions, it would be similar to that of the Weimar Republic (Germany), give or take an order-of-magnitude. But nowhere near the worse known, which as I recall was in Yugoslavia in the early 90's (c.15 years ago), which was something on the order of 1015% or about 10 orders of magnitude worse!
(Apologies if my numbers/dates are a bit off; except for the new notes and last "official" rate, this is all from memory (don't ask!).)
Posted by: blf | May 17, 2008 3:42 PM
The lesson, of course, is that, when you sit down in the restaurant, order all six beers immediately. If they get warm, just speak with an English accent and they will taste normal.
Posted by: (((Billy))) | May 18, 2008 9:11 AM
If we assume that Mugabe's government is evil, not stupid the question is why are they printing money like this? The benefit to the government is they can use the newly printed money before the rest of the population can. So it furthers the patronage power of the government. If for example it takes 500M $Z to buy a beer today, a government insider can run off 1B $z in the morning before he goes to the bar, so to speak. It is an extreme form of the government confiscating all private wealth.
Posted by: bwv | May 18, 2008 1:09 PM