This is a typical street scene. Because the Congolese Franc is not a stable currency people typically exchange them for USD. The price you see here is 783 francs to the dollar. This is up from 500 7 months ago. Today it hovers around 750. Part of my responsibilities as an intern is researching this phenomenon. I tell Congolese people all the time, money markets in the US is a complicated thing and only a select few do it. In the Congo however, you'll see ordinary citizens with huge thousands of dollars in cash trading currency from the back of the car trunks. The economic term for this is a parallel market, it is neither a black market nor a perfectly "white" market. It is somewhere in between and it operates alongside registered currency exchange dealers. Hyperinflation is a perennial problem in African countries, particularly in the DRC. Under the Mobutu dictatorship the governement started out printing smaller bills with denominations of 1's and 5's and later found themselves having to print out 10,000's and 100,000's. It's interesting to see the evolution of the economic policy through the money that they issued. Rather than tackling, the inflation problem, the governement simply introduced new currencies. In this way there have been at least 4 different currencies in the DRC within a 20 year span.