Events
Zimbabwe Hyperinflation
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Zimbabwe's currency collapsed through the 2000s under unconstrained central bank financing of government deficits, compounded by a sharp drop in agricultural output following the country's fast-track land reform program. Month-on-month inflation peaked in November 2008 at an estimated 79.6 billion percent, with prices reported to double roughly every day. The government abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar in early 2009, formally permitting the United States dollar, South African rand and other foreign currencies as legal tender, which halted the hyperinflation within weeks.
Facts
Event DateCited source gives "mid-November 2008" as the peak month; exact day is not stated there, dated to the first of the month. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With School
Cited as a modern illustration of Milton Friedman's dictum that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
Sources
1. Hyper Inflation in Zimbabwe
Economics Help (Tejvan Pettinger)article textQuote, article text
Roughly every day, prices would double.
1. Hyper Inflation in Zimbabwe
Economics Help (Tejvan Pettinger)Associated With School: Monetarist EconomicsView the Source 2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationHyperinflation in Zimbabwe, lead sectionQuote, Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, lead section
Zimbabwe''s peak month of inflation is estimated at 79.6 billion percent month-on-month, 89.7 sextillion (8.97×10²²) percent year-on-year in mid-November 2008.
Open Questions (1 open question)
What was Zimbabwe's exact peak month-on-month hyperinflation rate?
Zimbabwe stopped publishing official inflation statistics in mid-2008, at the worst of the crisis, so every subsequent figure is a reconstruction. Independent estimates for the November 2008 peak range from tens of millions of percent to the often-cited 79.6 billion percent month-on-month (89.7 sextillion percent year-on-year) figure derived by Hanke and Kwok from private price data, itself contested on methodological grounds by other economists who reconstructed the series differently.
What would resolve this A recovered, complete run of contemporaneous retail price data for the peak months, independently reconstructed by more than one research team using the same methodology, would let economic historians agree on a single figure rather than a range spanning several orders of magnitude.
Monetary economics, economic historyHyper Inflation in Zimbabwe
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