20 000 Dollars Emergency Bearer Cheque

By 2003, Zimbabwe's inflation had already begun outpacing the Reserve Bank's ability to print denominations fast enough for routine transactions. These bearer cheques — technically not banknotes under Zimbabwean law, a distinction that allowed the Reserve Bank to bypass certain statutory limits on money supply expansion — were issued as a stopgap, with Fidelity Printers in Harare scrambling to meet demand domestically rather than relying on foreign printers.

The bearer cheque format carried a printed expiry date, after which the instrument was theoretically invalid — a mechanism intended to discourage hoarding that became functionally irrelevant as inflation rendered the face value nearly worthless long before any expiry was reached.