system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How come the Zimbabwe dollar inflated so fast? How do people survive in a country with such hyperinflation?

Basically those two questions. I'd also like to know what's going on there right now - if your 100 trillion dollars is only worth 10 trillion tomorrow (lol) how can people even work and expect to survive?

Is the situation resolved? If so, how? If not, why not?
gpt
Hyperinflation is typically caused when a nation goes through a major crisis (war, political turmoil, etc) and has a simultaneous need to spend large amounts of money. The tax base has collapsed and the uncertain economy makes international borrowing unavailable, so the government starts to print money. 

The sudden, huge increase in the amount of money in circulation makes the currency less valuable. With the value of money shrinking, the government has to print ever more of it to meet its commitments. Very rapidly this turns into a spiral of hyperinflation. 

In the case of Zimbabwe specifically, the country entered into a plan of forced land redistribution. At least initially, the idea was to confiscate farms from the descendants of former European colonials and give the land to the poorest indigenous people. There were many problems with this plan. Chief among them, the recipients of the land knew very little about farming so productivity collapsed. Foreign investors saw property being confiscated and left the market. To make matters worse, the land grants were frequently awarded to cronies of the Mugabe regime. The government printed huge volumes of money to try to make up for the lost tax base and foreign investment. 

How do people survive? Well, you may have heard of other cases of hyperinflation from history where people try to adapt. In the southern US after the Civil War and in Weimar Germany after World War I, there were stories of people bringing cash to the markets in wheelbarrows to try to buy food. In some families, there are stories of people burning bundles of cash for heat in the winter because it was cheaper than buying fuel. 

In Brazil there was a saying that you should always take a bus instead of a cab because on a bus you pay when you get on; in a taxi, you pay when you get out and there is no telling how much the currency may have devalued during the ride. 

As others have said, many people turn to barter or other types of trade that are not dependent on currency. Sadly, in most affected countries, this also means a large increase in crime. 

The interesting thing is that barter holds the key to how Brazil finally managed to beat decades of hyperinflation. Economists noticed that people bartering would settle on fairly standard relative values of goods: just as an example, imagine two potatoes for one tomato. These same ratios held for the prices in the markets. If a potato was $50, a tomato was $100. When potatoes hit $50,000 tomatoes were $100,000. 

The economists called this "real value" and started referring to prices in units of real value. Storekeepers started putting units of real value in ads and on shelves and just posted an exchange rate between the currency and the real value (this was also much easier than re-pricing everything in the store every day). 

Eventually, after a few years of this, the country just switched to a new currency. Each unit of the new currency was equal to one unit of real value. The currency was even called the *real* (in Portuguese, the plural is *reais*). The switch was remarkably smooth, since everyone was already thinking in units of real value. 

It's kind of fascinating from a psychological standpoint as much as an economic one. You wouldn't expect that you could simply swap out a failed currency for a stable one, but in this case (with the right preparation) it actually worked.