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500 000 Dollars Bearer Cheque
| Issuer | Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe |
|---|---|
| Year | 2007 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Composition | Log in to see details |
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| Obverse description | Log in to see details |
|---|---|
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| Reverse description | The reverse is rendered entirely in green intaglio on a guilloche underprint ground. At centre, an oval vignette contains a finely engraved scene of a herd of African elephants moving through savannah grassland, with a large bull elephant dominant in the foreground and two smaller animals behind. The denomination numeral '500 000' is placed at upper left and lower right, with the issuer's name in bold letterpress across the top. |
| Reverse lettering | RESERVE BANK OF ZIMBABWE |
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| Comments |
By mid-2007, Zimbabwe's monthly inflation rate had already passed 6,000 percent, and the Reserve Bank was printing denominations that would have been unthinkable three years earlier. The 500,000 dollar face value on this cheque was not a rounding exercise — it reflected a real attempt to keep transactional paper in step with prices that were doubling in weeks. The "bearer cheque" designation is deliberate: these instruments were issued under the bearer cheque mechanism as a workaround when the central bank could not print conventional banknotes fast enough to meet demand.
Fidelity Printers & Refiners, a wholly government-owned facility in Harare, handled the entire run — the same operation that would struggle increasingly to source paper and ink as foreign exchange dried up.