The 1st Casualties of Hyperinflation
Private
Updated:
4/11/2024
Views: 1,126
My interest in Zimbabwean money was initially limited to the notes of the Third dollar series (called the "Trillions series" by many because it includes the famous / infamous 10, 20, 50 and 100 Trillion dollar notes). I only later expanded my efforts to include the 1st dollar, 2nd dollar, 4th dollar, bond notes and "new" / 5th dollar issues.
Continuing the hyperinflation theme from the notes set, the name for this set is a reference to the fact that coins often disappear early in a hyperinflation, and you just get notes. A complete type set for Zimbabwe is only 24 coins, but a complete pick set is 105 notes - and a lot of the different coin types result from substituting cheaper metals as the currency was devalued, leading up to the abandonment of coinage in 2003. A collection focused only on design and not composition would be even smaller.
As I worked on my note set in 2015-2019, there were many times where I thought about expanding into the coins - I even ran a few searches on eBay but when I did nothing ever really came up.
Why?
The NGC population for Zimbabwe coins was almost zero. At the start of 2021 NGC had graded fewer than 30 Zimbabwean coins and only about 7 of those were business strike coins - the others were proofs and NCLT.
In contrast, there's over 13,000 Zimbabwean notes graded by PMG.
I did get lucky and managed to score an NGC-graded, MS65, 1980 example of the KM-3a 10 cent coin in late 2019 and that is how this set started.
It was clear by that point in late 2019 that building a solid, reasonably complete, type set of graded Zimbabwean coins was probably going to require buying raw coins and getting them graded myself - something I normally shy away from because I am not a professional grader or an especially good grader. But dealers weren't going to grade these for resale because there is minimal demand. So, in June 2021 that's what I did. As a result, all of the coins in this set - save that one dime so far - were submitted for grading by me.
Around the same time as I submitted that 2021 submission there was someone else submitting these, and the population of NGC-graded MS Zimbabwe coins exploded from 9 to about 33 in the span of a couple of weeks in September 2021. Even so, about 40% of the NGC Graded MS Zimbabwean coins are in this set at the time I'm writing this.
My note collection - which has the full run listed from P-1 to P-105, is here:
https://notes.www.collectors-society.com/registry/notes/ViewPersonalCollection.aspx?UserCollectionID=1264&Tab=list
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The 1st Casualties of Hyperinflation
By Revenant
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