Set Description:
Only six months after the first redenomination the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe announced in February 2007 that there would be a 2nd redenomination and a third Zimbabwean dollar. However, the government said that stability would need to be achieved before they would release the new banknotes ("stability" defined as “only” double-digit inflation). They, of course, did not achieve this, but the 2nd redenomination occurred anyway in July 2008. 10 zeroes were removed - the decimal was moved 10 places (new currency code: ZWR).
All the 2007 dated banknotes in this series (which were prepared in Oct 2006 as part of the planned 2nd phase of "Operation Sunrise") were released into circulation on or after August 1, 2008. The 2007 issues run from $1 to $1,000. The series originally only included these 7 denominations but was extended with the creation of the 2008 dated 3rd dollar notes, which run from 10,000 to 100 Trillion. As a result, the series, which was originally only supposed to span 3 orders of magnitude, spanned 14 and included 27 banknotes.
The 2007 series banknotes use the Zimbabwe bird watermark. The 2008 series notes mostly do not feature the watermark. The $10,000 and $1,000,000 notes had it because they used paper originally intended for the $1,000 notes. The 2008 series banknotes (denominations of over $1,000), have a small security feature that uses the shape of the Zimbabwe bird watermark, but it is much smaller and executed with special optically variable ink.
The fact that the 2006-dated 2nd dollar bearer checks go up to 100,000 dollars (P-48) but the 2007-dated 3rd dollar notes only go up to 1,000 dollars (P-71) makes me think that a 2nd redenomination was always part of the plan with Operation Sunrise, but they probably thought that would be another 3 zero redenomination or something similar and not the staggering 10-zero removal they ended up doing.
It is a testament to the increasingly severe inflation that the 2nd redenomination occurred less than 2 years after the first, but, where the first redenomination removed only three zeroes, the second removed ten.
10 Billion ZWN (10^10) = 1 ZWR
10 Trillion ZWD (10^13) = 1 ZWR
The back side of the 3rd dollar notes (the “Trillions Series”) feature a pair of images that have some kind of national, cultural or economic significance to Zimbabwe. These images are different on each denomination though some of the images seem to have been used more than once on different denominations throughout the series. Some of the images seem to have been quite popular (getting reused multiple times throughout the 27 note series) where others seem to have been decidedly less so (only getting used twice, or even just once). The 27 note series has 54 places or slots for the square images to be placed in (2 per note). A total of 17 designs / images were used. The image the Great Zimbabwe Ruins appears the most often - it was used on 7 notes, or slightly more than one fourth of all the notes in the set. The image of a miner at work was the second most used, appearing 5 times. Five other designs were used four times each (the cattle farm, the Zimbabwe aloe, the elephant, the Kariba dam, and the cape buffalo).
As another fun feature of the set, 7 of the notes, or about one fourth of the set, is composed of Replacement / "Star" notes. These include the P-65, P-69, P-70, P-76a, P-80, P-81, and P-82.
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