A million dollar chicken.

Peta Thornycroft blogs from Zimbabwe:

With Zimbabwe’s official inflation now at 913 per cent, (international accountants say it is closer to 1500 percent,) it’s a pain going shopping. A decent sized whole chicken cost nearly a million Zimdollars this week.

It’s hard getting enough money to pay for a couple of baskets of basics as there are long queues in banks, and the automatic cash machines are always 'run out of funds' or jammed. Imagine being an accountant and checking the overdraft.

Interest rates are officially about 783 per cent. Last week it was 750 percent. A medium sized engineering company had an overdraft of Z$10 billion in December. Now it owes the bank Z$65 billion. It can’t pay. In theory its trading figures should have kept its overdraft manageable as the value of the Zimbabwe dollar shrinks daily....No one knows how high these extraordinary figures - inflation and interest rates - will go, nor what will happen when they continue to climb, minute by minute.

The Reserve Bank, which runs most of the country (the army runs the other part) acknowledges without blushing that it prints trillions and trillions of Zimbabwe dollars, to keep the economy going...

Every aspect of life in Zimbabwe is in a state of collapse. Education, health care, trade, commerce, and of course human rights...