Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Zimbabwe: Economic emergency? Understatement of the decade!


I'm not sure how this is even possible, but Zimbabwe's already-breathtaking annual inflation rate jumped from 2,233,713.4% (don't you love the ".4" at the end?) in May to just over 11,250,000% in June.

That's an official increase of 9,035,045.5 percentage points in a month! Many Zimbabweans think it is, in fact, much higher.

Mugabe's govt thought they were going to slow things down by lopping 10 (10!) zeros off the end of the Zimbabwe dollar, making Z$10 BILLION equal to Z$1 of new currency. Um, not working, buddy.

How can this country continue to function? Is everyone simply bartering for goods and services now? It sure seems like there's no way this can be sustainable for any significant amount of time, but we've been saying that about Zimbabwe for two and half years now.

The reality is everyone who has any means has already left. Most of the people left in the country are either on Mugabe's payroll, in which case money means nothing, or were already so poor that they had no money to be made worthless.

What a frickin' mess...

No comments: