Will 50 million Yen buy you a bag of popcorn?

[ChiefHappyButt]

Why do countries keep their currencies at such ridiculous levels? Couldn't they just agree to drop a few zeros from the price of everything. Am I the only one who thinks it a little funny? What if 50 thousand dollars only bought you a hamburger?

Any thoughts?

[Kamika]

1. Well it's not that easy

You can't just drop a 0 from devalued money

[ChiefHappyButt]

2. There oughta be a law, I tell ya

It just seems so strange to compare the currencies. Is the dollar so strong that it is truly "worth" that many pesos?

[SmileyBoy]

3. Turkey recently dropped six zeros from it's currency.

They call it the "New Lira", or technically the Turkish translation of that phrase. One Dollar used to be worth 1.7 million Lira, hence the jokes from the Howard Stern Show a few years ago regarding "Who Wants To Be A Turkish Millionaire?"

One Dollar now equals around 1.3 New Liras.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. The answer to your question is...

YES. Fifty million yen will buy you a a bag of popcorn. And you'll get maybe 49,999,500 yen back in change. :-) (I don't know the exact price of popcorn, since it's not a Japanese snack, but 500 yen seems about right.)

The current exchange rate is about 105 yen per dollar, so a yen is a little less than a cent.

Before WWII, a yen was a lot of money. and it was divided into smaller units. I once saw a Japanese TV drama taking that took place in the 1920s, and they spoke of 600 yen as enough money for two people to live on for two years. Nowadays, 600 yen would buy a bowl of noodles for one person.

They had mega inflation after WWII. When I was a student in Japan in the 1970s, there was talk of chopping some zeros off the end, but it never went anywhere.

Currently you get a lot of zeros in South Korea, where there about 1300 won per dollar.

[ChiefHappyButt]

6. thanks for the info

much appreciated.

[Rabrrrrrr]

5. 50 million Yen is about 400,000 US dollars

So unless your The Donald and getting your popcorn in solid gold form, or a bag of popcorn to you is eleventy-hundred metric tons of raw seed, yes, 50 million Yen will buy you a bag of popcorn.