There are numerous sellers on a certain auction site offering brand new 1 million Zimbabwe dollar bills. They go for about £2.
I've been toying with the idea of buying a dozen of the things, £24 outlay gets me 12 million Zimbabwe dollars.
My thinking is this: Mugabe won't go on forever, at some point someone in that country is going to get the economy right.....at which point, when hyperinflation has gone away, I cash in my 12 million.
What's the flaw?
You think that will work? When the economy is stable, all these zillion-dollar bills will still be in circulation. The value of a dollar is proportional to the amount of stuff divided by the amount of dollars. If the economy has a quadrillion dollars and makes a million loaves of bread (and nothing else), then a loaf of bread is worth about a billion dollars.
Just think about it: not only you, but everyone in Zimbabwe would suddenly be a zillionaire. They would try to buy all the yachts and mansions and giant plasma TVs, and nobody would work ever again, so there wouldn't be anyone to build the yachts and the mansions and the giant plasma TVs. Would that work? No, the prices would go up.
That's an impractically big number, too, so they'll probably re-denominate (remove zeroes) by issuing a new currency and letting you exchange a billion of the old currency for one of the new currency. This has happened three times already so there's no reason to think it won't happen again.
Until the economy is stable, actual Zimbabweans will continue to use other, relatively stable currencies, such as euros and US$, for their shopping and wages.
If someone else is trying to convince you that buying Zimbabwe dollars is an investment because they'll regain value, it's a scam.
The end of hyperinflation isn’t hyperdeflation restoring value to those bills. Instead, it’s redenomination where a new currency is created and barrow loads of the old currency can be exchanged for a single bill of the new currency. This happened three times in Zimbabwe, and the final Zimbabwean dollar was worth 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of the original ones. So if you had 12 million of the original ones, it would be worth a tiny fraction of a Zimbabwean cent (fourth issue). And even that currency was abandoned and demonetised, with the deadline for cashing in holdings having passed in 2016, and Zimbabwe stopped having its own currency at all, before creating yet another new Zimbabwean dollar. Old Zimbabwean dollars are worth precisely nothing as money and never will be — they only have collectible value.
When a period of inflation stops, it just means that currency isn't losing value anymore. It doesn't mean that it regains the value it lost during inflation. After a period of inflation, it may cost you $10 to buy what was previously $1 in goods. Once the inflation stops, it just means you won't have to spend $100 in the near future to buy those goods, it doens't mean that you go back to spending $1 on those goods.
In cases of extreme hyperinflation, it's common to redenominate currency. This doesn't change the value of currency, but just makes the numbers easier to work with - you might find that your $1M bill is redenominated to $1. The price of goods nominally changes from $1M to $1, but it's just a result of everyone agreeing to drop zeros from currency values. Nobody is made richer by dropping zeros from dollar values.
Obviously, if many people expected a $1M Zimbabwe bill to be worth more than $2 at any point in the foreseeable future, they would not be sold for $2. You can "cash in" your $1M bill for exactly what someone else will give you for it, which is currently $2, and unlikely to change much in the near future.
