Zimbabwe Prints a One Hundred Trillion Dollar Note

At independence in April 1980, the newly established Republic of Zimbabwe replaced the Rhodesian dollar with the Zimbabwean dollar at equal par value. In its earliest years, the young nation enjoyed buoyant economic indicators, sustained by profitable tobacco production and strong harvests in non-drought seasons. However, the subsequent decades brought severe structural shocks. Between 1991 and 1996, the government introduced an Economic Structural Adjustment Programme that had adverse effects across the economy. Later in the 1990s, extensive land reforms aimed at redistributing commercial farmland disrupted agricultural output. Many newly installed operators lacked farming training, and food production fell sharply over the following decade, with commercial farms producing less than a tenth of the maize they had harvested in the 1990s. Manufacturing contracted sharply, unemployment mounted to 80 percent, and the commercial banking sector faltered as loans dried up.

Faced with declining tax revenues and mounting public obligations, the government of President Robert Mugabe turned to expanding the monetary supply. Massive quantities of cash were printed to finance participation in the Second Congo War and to raise official salaries. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe also printed 21 trillion dollars simply to clear obligations owed to the International Monetary Fund. While authorities cited targeted economic sanctions from the United States and the European Union as the core driver of economic collapse, monetary authorities increasingly relied on printing notes of escalating denominations through foreign contracted suppliers, including the Munich printing firm Giesecke and Devrient.