Sep 18, 2008

In Singapore, insurance companies do more than just cover you when you turn up your toes. For whatever reason, whole-life insurance policies are seen as a legitimate investment tool over here (they’re not, by the way). Instead of brokerage accounts, Singaporean investors like to use “investment-linked insurance policies” - wrap accounts for unit trusts - as a way of accessing the markets, or just as a way to “pass something on to the children”.

Sep 4, 2008

At the beginning of August, the Zimbabwean central bank knocked ten zeroes off the Zimbabwean dollar exchange rate, and suddenly one USD was worth about forty ZWD. At the beginning of September, one USD is worth four thousand ZWD. That’s… what… 10,000% inflation per month… or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000% per annum (a hundred trillion trillion percent, for those keeping score at home). Which, admittedly, is a vast improvement over the old rate: 430 trillion trillion trillion percent.

Jul 1, 2008

Because the last post was so popular: ZimbabweanEquities.com has printed yesterday’s OMIR at somewhere north of 164 trillion to the USD. Now, even for Zimbabwe, that seemed kinda high. But… Old Mutual’s closing price yesterday in Harare was ZW$300,000,000,000; Ditto in London was 92.8p. The ratio is 1:1, so 1 GBP is worth 300 billion / 0.928, or about 323 billion ZWD; GBP/USD late yesterday (the WM Company fixing is close enough for government work) was 1.

Jun 24, 2008

Update: The Old Mutual implied exchange rate today is Z$78 billion to 1 USD. So you can chop all of the values listed below in half. Wow. As a followup to this morning’s wrap of the Zimbabwean currency market: it’s fascinating to read the business pages of the Zimbabwean papers and translate the numbers into USD. Here’s the stock market wrap from Pravda’s Zimbabwe edition this morning. (If you’d like to read a Zimbabwean newspaper that isn’t run by Mugabe’s propagandists, the Financial Gazette is apparently quite good.

Jun 24, 2008

Update: Hi to everyone arriving from FT Alphaville, Market Movers and the Economist! If you liked this post, click through to the main page and have a browse. It’s been no secret lately that Zimbabweans are stashing their cash in the stock market, because it’s the only store of value left. ZimbabweEquities.com shows just how ridiculous this has become. Interesting: there’s no longer any official inflation data, and there’s no official exchange rate data, but there is a way to find out how much the Zimbabwean dollar (ZWD) is worth and how fast it’s depreciating.