Last year we posted this piece from Taki’s Magazine, wherein Dalrymple described his visit to a shop selling The Tyrant Collection of banknotes. New English Review has now posted a kind of sequel to it, in which he describes his own banknotes, which he has divided into a tyrant collection and a hyperinflation collection (between which there is some overlap, as you might guess):

But the star of the hyperinflation collection, if I may so put it, is undoubtedly the Zimbabwean note for fifty trillion Zimbabwean dollars. I could have had the hundred trillion note, but I preferred the fifty for its cerulean colour—appropriate, considering that inflation in Zimbabwe had long since gone through the roof.

There was a reason why I preferred the blue note: I also possess a Zimbabwean $2 note dated 1986, when two such dollars would actually have bought you something. What is interesting (to me, at any rate) is that the design is almost exactly the same, $2 and $50,000,000,000,000.