250 000 000 Dollars Bearer Cheque

By mid-2008, Zimbabwe's monthly inflation rate had crossed 2.2 million percent — the 250 000 000 dollar denomination was not an outlier but simply one step in a cascading series of emergency bearer cheque issues that the Reserve Bank printed in rapid succession as purchasing power collapsed faster than new notes could reach circulation. Bearer cheques were technically short-term financial instruments with printed expiry dates, a legal fiction that allowed the government to issue currency outside the formal banknote authorization framework.

Gono's signature appears on instruments spanning denominations that would increase by factors of a billion within months. This note was effectively obsolete before most of the 12.175 million printed had been distributed.