UNITED STATES: Pennsylvania burglar makes off with 20 trillion ZimDollar bills

By Agencies & Staff Reporter

UNITED STATES: Police have revealed that a suspect made off with a 16-figure haul after burglarizing a Pennsylvania residence earlier this month.

Investigators told local media that the Bedford home was broken into on February 6 by “an unknown individual” who made off with several pieces of jewellery, silver dollars’ worth $20, and 2,000,000,000,000,000 in currency.

According to a police report, “twenty Zimbabwe 100 trillion-dollar bills” were swiped by the burglar.

The Zimbabwe bills – issued during a period of hyperinflation – are essentially worthless as currency. They are sold as a numismatic (collectors’) oddity for around $10 apiece.

The burglar also escaped with $30 in loose change.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe is struggling afresh with currency volatility which has seen the local dollar sink about 40 per cent since the start of the year, hurt by increased foreign-currency demand as weaker commodity prices reduce inflows.

The fresh plunge in the value of the Zimbabwean dollar means that everyone in the country with US$100 is now a millionaire in local-currency terms.

The government has said it is considering linking the exchange rate to assets such as gold.

“The idea going forward is to make sure that we manage the growth of liquidity which has a high correlation to money supply growth and inflation. The way to do that is to link the exchange rate to some hard asset such as gold,” said finance minister Prof Mthuli Ncube in a recent briefing.

“To do that you have to have some sort of currency board type system in place where the growth of the domestic liquidity is constrained by the value of the asset that is backing the currency.”