In Zimbabwe, a single copy of the Los Angeles Times would cost $250,000!

With a black market exchange rate of 555,000 to one for Zimbabwean dollars to the U.S. dollar, Zimbabwe news reports sound right out of “Austin Powers,” which makes sense since Kleptocratic, President-For-Life Robert Mugabe is the closest thing to a real Dr. Evil (outside of North Korea, that is):

It is against the law for anyone to carry more than 100 million dollars.

Youth militias conducting door-to-door searches took 200 million dollars from a single household.

We bribed them the police with 50 million dollars to let us go.

The Reserve Bank seized one haul of 10 trillion dollars being smuggled into the country.

These quotes are real and it’s easy to imagine a beggar asking passersby for “a million dollars for a cup of coffee” or a bell hop walking off in a snit after only getting a five-hundred thousand dollar tip.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe

Just last year, here was the situation in Zimbabwe that experts say has gotten much worse:

Up to 6 million people in Zimbabwe will need food assistance between January and March. International agencies are planning to provide food to more than 3 million people. Food is hard to find; prices are skyrocketing above most people’s ability to pay; and the country has a critical shortage of both fuel for distributions and foreign currency. (Reuters AlertNet)

“The situation is very serious in Zimbabwe when life expectancy goes from more than 60 years to just over 30 years in a 15-year span […] It’s not just a crisis – it’s a meltdown” (The Telegraph)

As long as Mugabe is in power, I can think of no word other than “hopeless” to describe the situation.

*By “against the law” in the title we mean it is illegal to have that much cash in the old currency and one is required to turn it in an an artificially low “official” exchange rate thereby losing much of the value in the transaction. Furthermore, carrying that much cash puts one at risk of being robbed by police or official youth mobs enforcing the currency restrictions. Who is benefiting from this? Independent observers note the immense palace-like homes being built by government officials in the capital. Figure it out.

tags: zimbabwe inflation

More Enough is Enough.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 8:35 am by Insider and is filed under Loons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.