How To Address A Letter To Venezuela

(money images) reed larsen, owner/manager of old glory mint: one of the things that we put together as a little display for some of clients is a series of 27 official notes. this is currency from the country of zimbabwe. and if you take a look here, this starts out at $1, and the date on it, i don't know if you can zoom in and see that or not, david, but in 2007

How To Address A Letter To Venezuela, they had ones, and then, of course, fives, tens, and twenties. and this was the currency that was being used. and as we well know, what happened to the; hyperinflation started to kick in and they started to print higher and higher denominations as people demanded more and more currency

and so they got up in the five hundreds and the thousands. we're still in 2007. here, in 2008, they started printing in the tens of thousands. so, in a period of less than one year, we went from ones, fives, and tens all the way up to tens and twenty thousands. you start looking up here at 50,000, 100,000, 500,000 and $1 million bills, and it just kept going and going and going. let me show you over here, we get the billions. and one and five and ten and twenty. and then here's a fifty billion dollar bill. on july 4 of 2008, a can of coke would have cost you 50 billion dollars for breakfast. but at lunchtime, it would be 100 billion. and by the time you got to dinner, it would be 150 billion dollars. their inflation rate, as you know, was approximately 10 to the 27th power. that's something that's just staggering.

and by the time they started printing; they said, well, forget the billions. let's just go to the trillions. and so they started printing ten, twenty, fifty and a hundred trillion dollar notes. they hired a german company to print these. and they placed the orders for these and by the time the german company was finished actually printing them, they weren't worth the paper and the ink that it took to make them. and so the german company never delivered them. they were never circulated. and so these are all uncirculated bank notes. but it illustrates how fast, how quickly, and how devastating hyperinflation can be. in 2007 to 2008, in a period of less than two years (about one and a half years), the currency imploded and now they don't even have a national currency in zimbabwe.

they now use hard currencies: gold and silver. david morgan: quite a lesson. and one i hope no one misses that lesson. thank you so much, reed. reed larsen: thank you, david. david morgan: buy real, get real, be real. www.silver-investor.com