The Z Word

By now, everyone has figured out just how bad things are – or have they? Since we can’t know how bad things will get, it’s difficult to judge how bad things are right now, and at what point along the road we are, and where the road leads.

Obama seems to have it all figured out though. He boldly declared that if we don’t pass the stimulus bill winding its way through Congress, “… Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.” Not be able to reverse? Did he really mean that?

Meanwhile, doom-and-gloomer, Marc Faber, came right out and said the Z word. That’s Zimbabwe, if you weren’t sure. Derisively referring to economists who seem to just want to print money like crazy, Faber said, “In the US, we have a totally new school, and it’s called the Zimbabwe school.”

You could be forgiven if you haven’t been following the sad tale of the destruction of civilization in Zimbabwe. The story hasn’t been anywhere in the US media, but what little news comes out of the formerly civilized country is pretty appalling.

After ousting Caucasian farmers from land they had tilled for a hundred years and redistributing the land to blacks, the Zimbabwean government sparked an economic crisis which it has been unable to reverse.

Zimbabwe’s seemingly perpetual president, Robert Mugabe, turned to printing money when faced with the crisis. The outcome was about what would you would expect – a lot of money that wasn’t worth very much. In fact, the latest estimates put Zimbabwe’s inflation rate at 516 quintillion percent. I have no idea how much that is, but it’s apparently a whole lot because wikipedia says that it means prices double almost every day.

Rumor has it that to exchange currency, you weigh Zimbabwe’s bank notes. I don’t know about that, but here’s a kid walking to the store:

Let’s hope we aren’t strolling down the same path.