100 Trillion Dollars!

imagine you're playing a game of Monopoly everyone begins with $1,500 and as you travel around the board players compete to purchase properties of varying prices from old can Road at $60 all the way up to Mayfair at $400 the aim is n to own a complete set of properties and purchase houses and hotels in order to charge other players rent and ultimately bankrupt them eliminating them from the game however you've made some pretty bad decisions and things aren't going very well at all so what do you do do you play on and simply hope for the best do you flip the board over in a fit of rage sending tiny pieces of plastic and metal flying around the living room or do you sneak away when nobody's looking and print more money let's suppose you pick the latter and print yourself a nice round sum of $10,000 suddenly the game's most valuable property with this highest potential rent of $2,000 seems like pocket change to you and as you navigate the board carelessly landing on own properties and paying their rent with ease the overall quantity of money present in the game increases now everyone has more money not just you but this fundamentally is still the same amount of goods available and because of this the purchasing power of your money Falls and in response the cost of everything Rises Old Kent Road is now worth 120 dollars double what it used to be and Mayfair is now 800 dollars the money you have is now worth less than it was and everything has gone up in price but don't worry you can just print more money this time $50,000 but the same thing happens again there's a lot more money floating around in the game and so it loses its purchasing power Old Kent Road now costs $1,500 and Mayfair has reached an enormous five figures and yeah you might physically have a lot more money but it's worth significantly less and so you print more and more and more $100,000 $250,000 half a million dollars and as its purchasing power Falls and prices rise to match that number just gets bigger and bigger 1 million 10 million 100 million and then you hit 10 figures 1 billion 10 billion 100 billion you get the idea well this is called hyperinflation if a little oversimplified and it's more or less what happened in Zimbabwe in the late 90s and early 2000s the government had made a series of bad decisions and introduce some alarmingly short-sighted policies the most prominent of which being land reform the president Robert Mugabe seized white owned farms and gave control of them to black Zimbabweans in the hope of addressing the wrongs of British colonial rule however most of these new owners knew almost nothing about farming and production subsequently plummeted there was significantly less food and the population was starving and what's more Mugabe had debts and ridiculous expenses of his own and no money with which to pay them so like in our game of Monopoly Mugabe came up with the bright idea of simply printing more money but as we've already seen now there was just more money chasing the same finite amount of goods which meant its purchasing power fell a loaf of bread might have costs a $1 but now cost 5 printing more money had him magically address the lack of bread just increased its price for nonetheless he printed more and more money and soon he got so extreme that the cost of bread was now in the thousands and then the tens of thousands and then the hundreds of thousands but it kept going he printed money so quickly and in such vast quantities that it devalued with unimaginable speed we're talking days or even hours as money flooded the market and cost dramatically increased people were desperate to get rid of their cash as quickly as they possibly could because even that evening it could be worth half of what it was in the morning and yet the government kept on going and whilst the bank knows grew number of zeros their purchasing power plummeted even quicker and the cost of everything skyrocketed to match Fred now cost literally millions but even then it just kept on going and soon lose millions turned into billions and then into trillions as ridiculous and disastrous as it may have been out of the whole fiasco were born some pretty unique banknotes now I do need to thank Bank no worldcom for providing these notes they came in this cool presentation folder and although this isn't a sponsored video they did send me these for free for which I am very grateful they even have a super interesting YouTube channel themselves the first is the ten trillion dollar bill that's thirteen zeros and as well as a lot of zeros the front of the note also features the Chembur balancing rocks a naturally occurring geological wonder near the country's capital Harare these rock formations are incredible and are intended to represent environmental protection developments and prosperity for the country something they spectacularly fell short of the front also features a Zimbabwe bird in color changing ink the national emblem of Zimbabwe are seen on the country's flag and towards the left there's a security strip again in color changing ink repeating RBZ the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe in terms of micro print there's not really a lot going on as can only be expected of a banknote mass-produced on such short notice but interestingly the only micro print I could see appears to have a typo the border of the rectangle to the right of the rocks is made up of tiny numbers which actually read 100 trillion not 10 trillion again I'd imagine this is a product of the rushed nature of these notes on the right of the note there's a feature called the see-through register where the denomination is partially printed on the front and the remainder on the reverse so that when held off to a light source the image is complete it's a security feature which makes them harder to counterfeit as criminals have trouble lining the two sides up accurately and lastly there's an under print image of a cow and some wheat grains seem more easily when exposed to UV light on the reverse there's an image of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe headquarters the country's tallest building at 120 meters in height in stark contrast to the ruins of Grace and Bob Way shown on the right grazing barbed wire is a country's capital built almost a millennium ago or was abandoned that fell into ruin in the 15th century the 50 trillion is almost identical on the front except for a slightly different shade of green the reverse sees the Kariba Dam a gigantic curved concrete damla straddles the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia and sits at the northern shore of Lake Kariba the world's largest man-made lake there's also an African bush elephant the largest living terrestrial animal native too much of Zimbabwe in central and southern Africa finally the 100 trillion again is almost identical to the 10 and 50 accepting color and the number of zeros on this is again just absurd the reverse features Victoria Falls regarded as the world's largest waterfall again sitting on the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia the waterfall was named in honor of Queen Victoria although many still know it by its indigenous name to smoke that thunders and on the right is a cape buffalo again found over much of central and southern Africa in fact both the elephants of Buffalo can be seen on the banknotes of neighbouring South Africa by 2009 hyperinflation had got so extreme that even one hundred trillion dollars were rendered completely worthless giving the country no choice but to abandon the Zimbabwe dollar foreign currency started being accepted instead including the US dollar the south african rand and the euro and as a result consumer prices finally began to stabilize today these currencies continue to be used once again I just want to say thank you to thank my world for sending me these for free and I really hope you enjoyed the video [Music] [Music]

Channel: Half-Asleep Chris

Views: 1,413,811

Rating: 4.8932939 out of 5

Keywords: 100 trillion dollars, trillion dollars, trillion banknote, trillion banknotes, zimbabwe dollars, zimbabwe banknotes, zimbabwe hyperinflation, what is hyperinflation, hyperinflation explained, cool banknotes, world's coolest banknotes, half asleep chris, half asleep chris banknotes, world currency, cool currency, banknote collecting, one hundred trillion dollars, trillionaire, zimbabwe 100 trillion, zimbabwe trillion, zimbabwe

Id: N2iSUlLD374

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Santos_L_Halper]

I have a 100 trillion note. I got it for $6 online. Figured I'd never see something like that again so I ordered it.

[u/shazvaz]

This is actually good for Bitcoin.

[u/HailYurii]

Why not just make the 100 trillion dollar bill 1 dollar?

[u/LLHallJ]

“Now give it back.”

“Give what back?”

[u/salmon10]

Bought a couple of those off Ebay. Fun party mixers

[u/Mein_Tarnaccount]

But hey, no white imperialist farmers, amirite?

[u/bitusher]

This is one of the main reasons Bitcoin was created. To create digital scarcity that banks and governments could not inflate and why the genesis block in Bitcoin refers to this newspaper headline of that day it was mined :

"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

For a 10 minute overview of why Bitcoin is important read this -

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/why-bitcoin-is-different-e17b813fd947

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/why-bitcoin-works-fe32879a73f5

For more in depth analysis this is a good start -

https://medium.com/@vijayboyapati/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin-part-1-of-4-94087a70d9e8

https://medium.com/@vijayboyapati/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin-part-2-of-4-c918977c40f6

https://medium.com/@vijayboyapati/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin-part-3-of-4-2e2c002593f1

https://medium.com/@vijayboyapati/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin-part-4-of-4-dd2ccd4fcfb3

[u/ZimbabweHeist]

Crazy

[u/GilgaFrank]

I have a few trillion dollars in my desk. I might use them to tip the next pizza delivery guy or girl.