Sunday, March 30, 2008

Money

Awful nice of Comrade Bob Mugabe to do his part to make the good ol' American dollar look pretty damned good by comparison:

With inflation estimated at 200,000 percent -- easily the highest in the world -- Zimbabwe's currency is barely worth the paper it's printed on. (The largest Zimbabwean note, 10 million dollars, can't buy more than a couple of sodas.) Foreign currency runs this economy now, mainly the U.S. dollar and the South African rand, nearly all of it traded on the black market.

The government of longtime President Robert Mugabe, who faces a critical reelection test on March 29, has pegged the exchange rate at $1 to 30,000 Zimbabwean dollars. But the currency is losing value at such head-spinning speed that on the streets of Harare, one U.S. greenback will soon fetch about 2,000 times that.


I don't even want to try converting all that to euros, or loonies for that matter. Guess that "land reform" thing is doing about as well as expected. Where they've tried actual "parecon" schemes in South America, they sound like they've actually worked, and people finally have a tangible share in what they do. Mugabe just let every bozo with a machete take whatever wasn't nailed down, turning what was at least a decent economy under the predations of Ian Smith into just another sub-Saharan subsistence regime.

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