Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Zimbabwe Stock Market Up 53% So Far This Year

New High for African Stock Exchange

Just as the S&P 500 Index has done so, the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange Industrial Index has made an all time high, rising over 53% so far this year. The stock exchange trades in United States dollars.

Runaway Inflation

The economic turnaround for Zimbabwe has been pretty amazing, as just a few years ago, the country had runaway inflation. Several years ago, the inflation rate of Zimbabwe exceeded 231,000,000% (that was the official rate, some economists believe that it was actually 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000%). Just to buy three eggs, it had cost 100 billion Zimbabwe dollars.

$100 trillion dollar bill

At that time, the country had been issuing currency as high as $100 trillion dollar bills. Zimbabwe eventually allow several currencies to trade in the country, including the U. S. dollar. Now the $100 trillion dollar bill is a collector's item and hasn't been printed for several years.

I had written an article back in 2010 in much more detail about Zimbabwe inflation.

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