I still have currency from about 10 years ago, but it is not Real, it says 1000 MIL CRUZADOS. How much is that? I have 3 bills of 1000 MIL CRUZADOS, plus about 300 Reals. Help.
1000 Mil Cruzados is worth more as a collectors item than as currency. The 300 Reais are usable in the economy today probably worth about $160-$175 at current exchange rate. If it’s a Cruzado note (not even Cruzado Novo), it’s worth a fraction of a cent, if anything at all. Better to frame it and sell it at a flea market. Brazilian currency is a trip… the Cruzado was introduced in 1986 to replace the then functioning currency, which I believe was the Cruzeiro. The idea was that this new currency would stop the inflation. I forget what the Cruzado plan was, but it didn’t work. Depending on what’s written 1000 Mil Cruzado, might be one million cruzado note, or it just might be a 1000 Cruzado note (where Mil means “one thousand”, sort of like how our dollar bills say “10 TEN Dollars”). Over the years from 1986-1994, Brazil had: Cruzeiros - (pre-1986) Cruzados Cruzados Novos - (new cruzados) Cruzeiros - (reintroduced to replace cruzados) Cruzeiros Novos - (new cruzeiros replacing less new cruzeiros) Reais - (plural of Real, replacing cruzeiros). Basically, new currency names were introduced when you started running out of space to print all the zeros that had to be written on the notes. So if you have a cruzado note, it’s at most one trillionth of a Real today, and probably much less. In fact, some notes were written with smaller zeros so you could visually drop them off, so for example, a fifty thousand Cruzeiro note might have 50,ooo written on it. The idea was that when it came time to lop off three zeros and use the note, you could just forget about the small zeros and still be able to keep track of things. The Real is interesting for two reasons. 1) The currency during the 19th century Brazilian Empire was called the Real, which means both “real” and “royal.” During that time, there was an imperial family (descended from the Portuguese royalty). 2) Hyperinflation basically stopped with the introduction of the modern Real (and got the finance minister - Fernando Henrique Cardoso - elected president). What they did was have a period of about 3 months where they kept using the Cruzeiros Novos and had a parallel price called the “Unidade Real de Valor (URV)” (Real Unit of Value) which was approximately worth $1 USD. Every day, the newspapers published what the URV-Cruzeiro Novo exchange rate, and store managers were supposed to list their prices as URVs. When you got to the cash register, they would convert the URV price to Cruzeiros Novos and you’d pay whatever that was. The idea was that people were supposed to get used to the fact that the Cruzeiro Novo number would keep inflating, but the URV value would stay the same, being the “Real” value. Then about 3 months into it, they eliminated the Cruzeiro Novo entirely and introduced a new currency, the Real, where 1 Real = 1 URV. After that, people would get used to stable “Real” prices. So there’s a pun there. Interestingly enough, after about 2-3 months of using Reals, a whole bunch of banks went belly-up… they were used to making tons of money on the overnight inflationary float (basically when you deposited a check, they’d put it on their books the same day, but put it on your account the next, and pocket the difference). When that income disappeared because there wasn’t enough inflation for them to capture value from that, a whole bunch of them started going into the red. Brazilian history is so fascinating, because it’s just “bizzare.” And the people are so delightful.
fascinating stuff bchad! I went back to count them: I have 131 Reais, plus 3 bills, each saying 1000 MIL CRUZADOS. Is 10 years long enough for these to be collectors items?
The women are delightful as well… I think it is an interesting place to operate a business, but with all the regulation, rather difficult at times. The taxes and regulation really govern how certain things are structured…