Sub-Saharan African currency experts are taking a “wait and see” approach to whether Zimbabwe’s newest effort at establishing a new national unit used for the exchange of goods and services can go the distance that the last five attempts within the last decade did not, Bloomberg reports.
The name “ZiG,” short for Zimbabwean Gold – which it is backed by, as well as foreign reserves – is definitely kind of playful, catchy, and lends itself easily to use as a verb, eg “ZiG me now you cheap motherfucker!” That’s a plus. A minus is that it’s Zimbabwe, where in 2008 the Zimbabwean Dollar hit a 500 billion percent inflation rate. That’s what Bloomberg wrote. It sounds like some kind of pointless abstraction from a 10 year-old kid who says his Fortnite Nerf gun is 500 billion times cooler than the generic one you had when you were his age, but apparently it really happened. On the plus side, Bloomberg’s article seems to say that Zimbabwean officials are taking it slow this time around, with the only real legal mandate for the ZiG for now is requiring businesses to pay at least half of their tax bill in the unit. Other than that they aren’t clamping down on USD quite yet.
Investors still might want to stick to “holding pattern” to see if some irresponsible fucking asshole is just going to print like 900 bajillion ZiGs to pay government vendors and workers. That’s how they got into trouble with hyperinflation the last time around. And the seven or eight times before that.