What Happens When A Currency Loses All Value?

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Zimbabwe, November 2008. The official inflation rate hits 89.7 sexillion%.

[00:00:09]That's a number with 21 zeros after it.

[00:00:13]Prices are doubling every 24 hours. A few months later, the central bank prints a single bank note with a face value of 100 trillion. And that $100 trillion note cannot even pay for a bus fair.

[00:00:28]This is the literal documented endpoint of a currency that two decades earlier was considered one of the stronger in southern Africa. Now I want to walk you through five of these five currencies that died within living memory across five different decades. So let's get into it. We'll start with Zimbabwe because Zimbabwe has the textbook case everyone half remembers and nobody really understands. The root cause was not the weather and it was not sanctions. It was a government running persistent fiscal deficits and financing them by ordering the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe to print whatever was needed.

[00:01:12]By 2007, the inflation was so visible, the government did something that should set off alarm bells for anyone watching any government anywhere. They declared inflation illegal and started arresting business executives for raising prices.

[00:01:29]Think about what that means. The state could not control the cause, so they criminalized the symptom. By mid 2008, it took 100 billion Zimbabwean dollars to buy three eggs.

[00:01:43]And per capita, income had more than haved in a decade. Here's the part that matters. Zimbabwe didn't just collapse and learn its lesson. In 2019, the government launched a new currency, the RTGS dollar, and it collapsed, too, with inflation back over 500%.

[00:02:05]In 2024, they launched another one, the Zigg, backed by gold. That's the sixth currency in 16 years from the same government and the same printer with the same outcome. Same printer, same hand, same outcome. And you'll see the same fingerprints on the next four currencies that we now look at. Now, let's look at Yugoslavia, 1992 to 1994. This is one that's not spoken about as much. 22 months of hyperinflation. The monthly inflation rate peaks at 313 million% in January 1994 with daily inflation running at 62% and hourly inflation of 2%. Higher per hour than most developed countries see in a single year. The cause was slobedon milic's war. By December 1993, almost 95% of all government spending was being financed with freshly printed dinars.

[00:03:11]The government issued a 500 billion dinar bank note, ran five revaluations in four years, and pushed eight distinct versions of the dinar into circulation.

[00:03:23]The abstract numbers are jaw-dropping, but here's the human stake. Winter of 1993 in Bgrade, a pensioner's entire monthly check, if spent the moment it arrived, was barely enough to buy three liters of milk. Businesses stopped paying wages in cash because cash was useless by the afternoon. So, they paid in goods. People bartered and some shops stopped pricing items in dinars at all.

[00:03:50]They priced in points pegged to the Deutsch mark because the official currency has become unusable as a unit of measurement. Notice the pattern repeating. Government has a hole.

[00:04:02]Government prints to fill it. Citizens flee to harder assets. The currency loses its function as a store of value first, then as a medium of exchange, then as a unit of account in that order.

[00:04:16]Now, Venezuela, this one is happening right now. For most of the 2000s under Hugo Chavez, more than 90% of Venezuelan export earnings came from oil. That oil money funded social programs, subsidies, and entire welfare architecture. Then, oil revenues collapsed. The government did not cut spending. It turned to the printer. By 2018, annual inflation exceeded 1 million%.

[00:04:47]At the peak in late 2016, prices were doubling every 18 days. And by mid 2019, the minimum wage in dollar terms had collapsed from $8 a month to $2 a month.

[00:05:00]Watch the playbook again. The government issued currency controls and set a fixed exchange rate against the dollar that had nothing to do with reality, making it functionally illegal to exchange boulevards for dollars at the actual market rate. And under Venezuelan law, it became illegal to publish the parallel exchange rate. Just like Zimbabwe arresting executives, Venezuela criminalized the act of telling the truth about the price of its own currency. Venezuelans who could fled to the dollar. The ones with internet access increasingly fled to crypto.

[00:05:36]Venezuela now ranks near the top of Latin America for crypto adoption.

[00:05:41]Nobody in Karacas read a libertarian white paper first. Their savings were being vaporized in real time and they needed something the government could not print into oblivion. IMF estimates put Venezuela's 2025 inflation near 270%.

[00:05:59]the highest in the world. That collapse is still ongoing. Now, Argentina, Argentina is different. Not one collapse, but the chronic case. Between 1969 and 1991, after a series of monetary reforms, the Argentine state stripped 13 zeros off its currency.

[00:06:23]13.

[00:06:25]One peso today is equivalent to about 10 trillion of the pesos in use in 1970.

[00:06:33]In 1989, inflation hit over 3,000% annually. And in July of that year alone, prices rose 200%.

[00:06:44]Emergency bank notes of 10,000, 50,000, and 500,000 Austri.

[00:06:52]Then in 1991, Argentina tried the institutional fix, a currency board with the peso pegged one to1 to the US dollar by law. Discipline imposed by statute.

[00:07:03]For about a decade, it worked until the fiscal deficits returned. The peg broke in 2001 and the country collapsed into another crisis. In 2023, inflation hit 211% under new government. In 2024, it fell to 117%. And in 2025, figures are tracking near 31%.

[00:07:25]That 31% is being celebrated as a victory. That itself is the tell. When 31% annual inflation is the good news, you are inside a system that has redefined normal so many times, the baseline is unrecognizable.

[00:07:44]Now, members in our Discord have been talking about these dynamics already.

[00:07:48]So, if you'd like to, you should go to learningcrypto.com if you want to be a part of that conversation. Now, the fifth one is the one that should disturb you the most. Lebanon. Lebanon is not a story about a printer running wild. It's a story about counterparty risk made visible. From 1997 until October 2019, the Lebanese lera was pegged to the dollar at 157 to one, a 22-year peg, stable, official, sanctioned by every international institution. Then in late 2019, the peg broke. By 2023, the LRA hit 140,000 to the dollar on the parallel market, a 98% devaluation in roughly four years. That is not the disturbing part. The disturbing part is what happened to the people who had savings in Lebanese banks. The banks couldn't honor withdrawals. The dollars depositors thought they owned on paper in their accounts were gone. The banks had used them, lent them, lost them, or transferred them out. So Lebanese citizens, ordinary people with ordinary deposits, started walking into their own banks with weapons, not to rob the bank, but to withdraw their own money for cancer treatment, school fees, groceries.

[00:09:12]The press in Lebanon began calling them folk heroes, and almost none were prosecuted. Then the government did a fresh start. In February 2023, they devalued the official rate by 90%.

[00:09:25]Anyone with dollar deposits who tried to withdraw in LRA at the new rate still took a haircut of around 75% against the real market rate. GDP fell from roughly $55 billion to around 20 billion in 2 years. Now, if your bank legally cannot give you your own money back, in what sense was it ever your money? That's not rhetorical. The number on your banking app is not money. It's a promise. And when the promise breaks, the number is meaningless. Five countries across five decades, each with a different political story on the surface. Every government blames something external. The common variable is not the external pressure. The common variable is that every one of these governments had the unilateral ability to print to cover its deficits and every one of them used it. The fresh start was always the trap. Zimbabwe is on its sixth currency. Argentina has stripped away 13 euros off its peso since 1970.

[00:10:31]And Yugoslavia, for its part, burned through five revaluations in four years.

[00:10:38]Each new currency arrived with promises of independence, discipline, sometimes gold backing. Each one failed because the issuer never changed. Every one of these systems required you to trust that humans would not print five times in living memory. And that's just the five that we've covered today. That trust was betrayed. What is the structural reason to believe the next attempt is different? There isn't one. Not as long as the mechanism is the same central authority. This is why we need a monetary system whose supply schedule is enforced by mathematics, published openly, verifiable by anyone, suppressible by no one. Bitcoin's value proposition is not that it just goes up.

[00:11:33]It's that no government can do to it what was done to the Bolivar, the LRA, the dinar, the peso, and the Zimbabwean dollar. The supply schedule holds because no one is running it. No chair to capture, no committee to pressure, no printer to seize. If you want to keep watching this picture unfold in real time, the free weekly report at learning crypto.com walks through the macro week by week. Five currencies, five betrayals. The rest is up to