Skip to main content

Zimbabwe introduces 100-billion-dollar note!


Sat Jul 19, 1:45 PM ET

HARARE (AFP) - Zimbabwe, grappling with a record 2.2 million percent inflation, has introduced a new 100-billion-dollar bank note in a bid to tackle rampant cash shortages, the central bank said Saturday.

The new note will go into circulation on Monday, the bank said in a statement cited by state media, joining about half a dozen new high denomination notes already issued this year.

In January, a 10-million-dollar note was issued, then a 50-million-dollar note in April. In May, notes for 100 million and 250 million dollars were issued, swiftly followed by those for five billion, 25 billion and 50 billion.

The southern African nation, currently gripped by a post-election crisis, has been ravaged by hyperinflation which shot up from 165,000 percent in February to 2.2 million in June.

Independent economists however believe the official inflation figure is grossly understated, estimating it could be running between 10 million and 15 million percent.

Zimbabwe's chronic economic crisis has left at least 80 percent of the population living below the poverty threshold and mass shortages of basic goods in shops.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Soy Products Can Reduce Sperm Counts!

By: Heather Hajek Published: Friday, 25 July 2008 www.healthnews.com C alling all men who want to become fathers! Soy products may reduce a man's sperm count. Based on a recent study, men who consume soy products may have lower sperm counts than those who don't. The study was based on a small group of men who visited the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center from 2000 to 2006. Even though the study found that some of the men who ate soy products on a regular basis had lower sperm counts, the researchers conducting the study are not saying that soy products were the cause of the lower sperm concentrations. The men who had soy products in their diets recorded lower sperm counts than those that didn't, but their counts were still within the normal range. Researchers don't deny that during the study men who consumed soy products had lower sperm counts, but they want people to realize there are other factors other than soy products that may have played a role in th...

Obesity linked to quantity of sleep!

P eople who sleep fewer than six hours a night - or more than nine - are more likely to be obese, according to a new US study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies. The study also linked light sleepers to higher smoking rates, less physical activity and more alcohol use. The research adds weight to a stream of studies that have found obesity and other health problems in those who don't get proper shuteye, said Dr Ron Kramer, a Colorado physician and a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "The data is all coming together that short sleepers and long sleepers don't do so well," Kramer said. The study is based on door-to-door surveys of 87,000 US adults from 2004 through 2006 conducted by the National Centre for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Such surveys can't prove cause-effect relationships, so - for example - it's not clear if smoking causes sleeplessn...

Women with long nails speak out against iPhone design.

M ost people either love or hate the iPhone's touch screen, and based on a report on the LA Times , women with long fingernails are among the haters. Why? Well, since the iPhone's touchscreen only responds to electrical charges emitted by your bare fingertips, women with long nails are left out in the cold. A woman interviewed for the article went so far as to suggest Apple was being misogynistic because it did not include a stylus for women and didn't consider womens' fingers and nails when designing the phone. Honestly, though, this same argument has come up against keyboards, touch screen monitors, and anything else that involves the use of your fingers, so should every gadget maker change the design of its products to accommodate users with long nails, or should people with long nails learn to work around this problem like they have in the past? I'd love to hear what Apple has to say about all this, but I doubt they'll ev...