December 03, 2003
The million dollar...
... no, the million lei bill will be released on December 5 -- allegedly to make holiday shopping easier. One Dollar buys 33,800 Lei at the moment - so yes, the million bill will alleviate the cash flow some. However, I think they should have just scratched away a zero or two or three. But nobody asks me... :-)
Posted by claudia at December 3, 2003 04:33 PMThey will cut also the zero (3 or 4) in a few months.. anyway.. next year.
Last time we had 1 milion lei was after the second war (I think) and it last only a few months. After that they cut some 0s.
By the way..which is the source of information about Romania for you? (newspaper, TV.. ?)
I read today in the newspaper that other countries have already banknotes which are bigger than this one.. and I do not know if is good or bad.
Have you seen the Christmas lights on Magheru?
Hi Anca (or is it Misha?) --
I have heard that the "hard lei" will be introduced in 2005. The Ministry of Finance is still deciding whether to remove three zeros or four. Since the lei is about 40,000 to the euro, the new lei will be about 40 (or maybe 4) to the euro.
Yes, other countries have bigger banknotes. The Turkish lira is about 1,700,000 to the Euro. The biggest Turkish bill is 20,000,000, or about $14. I know that Indonesia and Azerbaijan also have currencies with a lot of zeros -- the Indonesian rupiah was usually between 10,000 and 20,000 per dollar when I lived out there.
Oh, and Yugoslavia went through a period of hyper-inflation in the early-to-mid 1990s. (If you think for a moment, I'm sure you can guess why.) The Yugoslav dinar crashed to about .0000000001 dollars. You needed 1,000,000,000 dinars to buy bread, and the largest note was 100,000,000,000. (You can still buy these notes as souvenirs.) Eventually the Yugoslavs chopped a lot of zeros off, and today the dinar is pretty steady at about 60 to the dollar.
How we get our information... that would probably make a post in itself.
We haven't seen the lights yet, but we'll watch for them!
Doug M.