How bad hyperinflation can get
The remarkable story about Zimbabwean hyperinflation:
The cumulative devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar was such that a stack of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (26 zeros) two dollar bills (if they were printed) in the peak hyperinflation would have be needed to equal in value what a single original Zimbabwe two-dollar bill of 1978 had been worth. Such a pile of bills literally would be light years high, stretching from the Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy.
boingboing.net
I may not "get" economics, but I'm fairly certain that there's a point at which you can simply refer to a currency as "worthless".
boingboing.net
OK, I know I'm ignoring the point, this is kind of cool, since math of this scale is typically *wrong*.
The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.54 million light years away (2.54 x 10^6); and there are 9.46 trillion kilometers in a light year (9.46 x 10^12).
That puts the Andromeda galaxy at 24 million trillion (2.4 *10^19) kilometers from here (give or take a km or two.)
Bills are about 0.1 mm thick, so you need 10 million (10^7) of them to make a kilometer a stack high (10 to get a millimeter, 10,000 to get a meter...)
Multiply the number of bills needed to make a kilometer (10^7) by the number of kilometers to Andromeda (2.4 x 10^19), and you get 2.4 x 10^26... he actually got height of the stack of bills right!
The problem is that at a weight of 1 gram, that stack weighs 2.4 x 10^23 kg; about halfway between the mass of Mercury and Titan (Saturn's moon). So before we build our cash-bridge to Andromeda, we'll need to develop a fairly major space-mining program.
boingboing.net
And its my understanding that Zimbabwe's inflation was only the 2nd worse hyperinflation in history. After WWII in Hungary prices where on average doubling almost twice a day for a time. But since the currency essentially becomes worthless fairly quickly exact measures of hyperinflation probably don't mean very much. |
