Good morning, all.

I’m back! Or, at least, I’ll be properly back from Monday. And in my ‘absence’ from the daily posts, it appears that you all got spammed. For those that didn’t catch my apologies and explanations on Facebook and Twitter, here is what happened:

1. For the last month or so, in the background, we’ve been working on a ridiculously exciting new website.
2. I’ve hooked up with this amazing web-designer-artist, who has found ways to turn the last four years of content into something that is easy to navigate.
3. Last weekend, we were downloading content from the current site and linking it to new site which is still sitting off-site. Or something like that. #notmypartoftheproject
4. Anyway, in the process of doing that, WordPress got excited.
5. Or, more specifically, JetPack got excited. Sidebar: JetPack is the WordPress plugin that houses all your email addresses and my twitter account connection, and it does the background work of automatically sending new posts/links into your inboxes and onto my twitterfeed.
6. And in JetPack’s excitement, it tweeted/emailed you a whole bunch of blog templates. In latin.
7. Within minutes, I started getting emails, tweets, DMs, facebook posts, telegrams, whatsapps and phone calls (yes – phone calls) to ask me if the site had been hacked.
8. Fortunately, it hadn’t.
9. But we dashed around and shut off JetPack until we could see what was happening.
10. So if you’re wondering why you missed some of this week’s earlier posts in your inbox (if you hadn’t already unsubscribed to the mailing list), then it’s because I only reactivated JetPack again on Tuesday afternoon.

 
Again, my apologies for cluttering your inboxes with our work in progress.

And I can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on.

In the interim, here is something on Venezuela’s Hyperinflation:

Now, while I like this ‘scrolling’ business, this does seem like Zimbabwean child’s play. Here’s a picture of Zimbabwe’s devaluation:

The point is: 90,000 bolivars to the dollar by 2017?

Between 1997 and February 2009, the Zimbabwe Dollar went from 10 to 1 against the US dollar, to 3 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 to 1 against the US dollar (although, by this point, the Reserve Bank had rebased the dollar twice, effectively removing 25 zeros from the end). Either way, we were still floating around at about 3 octillion old-Zimbabwean dollars to the US dollar. And that’s only an estimate. You could add zeroes there by orders of magnitude and still be approximately right.

Fun fact about stars in the Universe:

How’s that for a comparative scale?

Happy weekend.

Rolling Alpha posts about finance, economics, and sometimes stuff that is only quite loosely related. Follow me on Twitter @RollingAlpha, or like my page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/rollingalpha. Or both.