Zimbabwe’s Currency Collapses
| More news stories on Zimbabwe |
|---|
Pravda, September 30, 2008
Zimbabwe began officially trading in foreign currency Friday in what is seen as tacit acknowledgment that its own currency has collapsed.
The change is expected to ease acute food shortages that have coincided with Zimbabwe’s record inflation and economic meltdown.
The central bank said it issued about 600 licenses allowing stores, supermarkets, gasoline importers and other businesses to import and sell goods for U.S. dollars, South African rand and other foreign currencies.
The licensed shops are reminiscent of Soviet-era hard currency shops in Eastern Europe.
With the collapse of the tourism industry as well as agricultural and manufactured exports, most of the foreign currency in the country comes from the millions of Zimbabweans working overseas and sending money home to relatives.
Much of it is already traded on the illegal black market. Central bank researchers say Zimbabweans spend millions of U.S. dollars each month on shopping trips to neighboring countries to buy the corn meal staple, cooking oil and other goods including spare car parts and electronics.
With foreign currency trade now legal, business managers said they expected goods to slowly return to supermarket shelves, though it would take time to find stocks and work out financial details.
Stores will be able to sell goods for both hard currency and the local Zimbabwe dollar. Only imported goods may be sold for hard currency.
The Reserve Bank said in a statement it charged businesses US$20,000 for a license, and will also get 15 percent of the foreign currency sales.
Officials at one nationwide store chain said they would open a few foreign currency outlets in coming weeks, but were unable to come up with the US$600,000 fee needed to license 30 supermarkets.
The government and central bank have been struggling to contain Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown, with official inflation at 11 million percent—the highest in the world—though independent financial institutions put real inflation closer 50 million percent.
Some 4.5 million Zimbabweans have fled to neighboring countries as far as the United States, Australia and former colonial power Britain. As many as 2 million are living in South Africa, according to central bank estimates.
Zimbabwe had been self-sufficient in most household supplies until June 2007, when the government ordered a price freeze that forced businesses to sell products below cost. Now, toilet tissue is being imported from Malaysia, toothpaste from Egypt and soap from Iran.
In August the central bank struck 10 zeros from the Zimbabwe currency, but computerized accounting systems and automatic tellers have been unable to handle transactions in trillions of local dollars.
Aid agencies estimate up to 2 million people will need food aid next month, amid regular power and water outages and chronic shortages of gasoline, corn meal, bread, milk and other staples.
President Robert Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, blames Western sanctions for the economic collapse. But critics point to his 2000 order that commercial farms be seized from whites. The often violent seizures disrupted the agriculture-based economy.
Western sanctions targeting individuals and companies supporting Mugabe’s regime were tightened after disputed elections in March and June that led to a power-sharing deal between Mugabe and his opponents signed Sept. 15.
Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change have so far failed to agree on the composition of a unity Cabinet.
(Posted on September 30, 2008)
Comments
The same thing will happen here if that black Obama gets elected. Black run governments fail. The USA will become a broken hellhole just like Zimbabwe or South Africa.
George Manuelian
Atherton, CA
Posted by George Manuelian at 7:37 PM on September 30
“The Reserve Bank said in a statement it charged businesses US$20,000 for a license, and will also get 15 percent of the foreign currency sales.”
How generous of them.
Posted by jewamongyou at 8:16 PM on September 30
So Zimbabwe has finally gone from having a near-worthless currency to having no currency at all.
Blacks never were any good with money.
Posted by at 8:25 PM on September 30
Coming soon to America!
Posted by ccbrave at 8:42 PM on September 30
Same old story…
“Third-world undesirables ruin their own nation and then spread their misery elsewhere by emigrating.”
Film at 11.
Posted by at 9:26 PM on September 30
Perhaps if the US sees the election of its first “black” president, we too will go the way of Zimbabwe. After all, has not Obama promised an exagerrated vision of Johnson’s Great Society should he be elected? Would not the implimentation of such a vision, given the already horrendious economic position of the US, rapidly require and equally as rapidly produce a massive effort to print dollars to feed Obama’s ideology? The Zimbabweans may be paying 20K in US $’s to be allowed to conduct business in foreign currencies today, but what makes anyone think that after a few years of Obama American businessmen will not be applying for similar licenses to conduct their business in Zwiss Francs or gold and paying a similar price in those curriencies to do so? We all know what massive government spending leads to. We also all know what happens when blacks take leadership positions in our own country and around the world. The two appear to be closely connected. Perhaps the stupid party should begin running political adds depicting Obama presiding over a Zimbabwean economy in true black African style—-with the background message being, elect Obama and you will soon be living in a third world black jungle like the current Zimbabwe.
Posted by at 9:42 PM on September 30
And where will they flee to once South Africa collapses into chaos? Heart of Darkness, indeed.
Posted by Xenophon at 9:45 PM on September 30
Seems to me like the Democratic congress and the Bush white house have us well on the way to a Zimbabwe type economy. I guess they wanted to help get our affirmative action Presidential candidate off to a great start and driving a stake into the American nation to make way easier for the new globalist dictatorship.
Posted by Enough at 10:36 PM on September 30
“The central bank said it issued about 600 licenses allowing stores, supermarkets, gasoline importers and other businesses to import and sell goods for U.S. dollars, South African rand and other foreign currencies.”
Which very soon are going to be just as worthless.
Anybody here up for starting a barter network?
Posted by Wild Eyed Charlie at 11:11 PM on September 30
“The change is expected to ease acute food shortages that have coincided with Zimbabwe’s record inflation and economic meltdown.”
Glad to see we’re openly lying now. There’s an acute food shortage in Zimbabwe because they decided to murder white farmers and seize their land.
“Aid agencies estimate up to 2 million people will need food aid next month, amid regular power and water outages and chronic shortages of gasoline, corn meal, bread, milk and other staples.”
How about we let them starve instead?
Posted by at 12:42 AM on October 1
No offense to the Americans here but I personally would have used the Euro as the trade currency of choice due to its relative stability.
Posted by A. Windaus at 2:44 AM on October 1
They shouldn’t worry. The USA will bail them out.
Posted by at 7:00 AM on October 1
Will the US or Europe donate food? Very probably.
Will it matter? No. In the long run, the outcome will be exactly the same, with the exception that there will be more suffering along the way.
Posted by at 9:10 AM on October 1
I was reading a very crazy, very leftist blogger, who was literally giddy that the bailout would pass, and Obama, when elected, would be “in charge” of the nation’s banks.
Posted by at 11:14 AM on October 1
Zimbabwe is a slimepit of corruption, violence, illiteracy, starvation and thuggery. I don’t want one nickel of my taxes going to support that country or its rotten anti-white Mugabe dictatorship.
Posted by Seek at 11:50 AM on October 1
Put your wallets back folks, thanks to Mugabe there is no need for aid to Zimbabwe. The only country in the world where everybody is a billionaire. On a related note, a former Rhodesian government pensioner now living in Australia, offered three years back-pay of his pension refused to accept it. The cost of postage was a lot higher than the actual pension.
Posted by c at 1:57 PM on October 1
I didn’t know Zimbabwe still had a currency to collapse.
Oh well, another stirring example of black African rule, which always seems to produce a monotonously identical outcome of total economic, cultural, social, and infrastructural devastation.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s on the continent of Africa or in the cities of America, the result is always the same. And roughly half the American public wants to put a typical Kenyan and his Winnie Mandela style wife in the White House.
Posted by john at 2:02 PM on October 1
“And where will they flee to once South Africa collapses into chaos?”
Posted by Xenophon
Don’t even think it!
Posted by at 3:10 PM on October 1
A. Windaus wrote:
“No offense to the Americans here but I personally would have used the Euro as the trade currency of choice due to its relative stability.”
No offense taken. In fact, your suggestion is a logical one. If you live in a European country, I hope your country learns from the US govermnent’s diversity crimes against its White citizens.
The USA is ruined, but perhaps your country has time to learn from the crimes of the American government and rid itself of the deadweight of undesirables before they reach critical mass and drag you and your country down the sewer pipe too.
Posted by at 3:14 PM on October 1
The Euro is more stable than the US dollar mainly federal reserve bank has been printing money at breakneck speed. Every time you hear on the news that the US government is “increasing the money supply”, translate this as “printing more paper”.
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 4:13 PM on October 2
I read from other sources that many black Zimbabweans long for the days when the country was Rhodesia, because of how life was better for them.
I have also read during the brief time Rhodesia was an independent country, black Rhodesian soldiers fought along side of white Rhodesian soldiers, against the Marxists.
I have also read that President Jimmy Carter was responsible for helping to bring down Rhodesia and put the tyrant, Robert Mugabe, in power. Thanks, Jimmy for the starving, miserable Zimbabweans, worthless currency, and thousands of dead elephants!
Anyway, I may be historically accurate or inaccurate in my post. But if anyone reading this post knows more about the history of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, please respond with another post with what you know.
One thing I am certain of; singer Clem Tholet, when he passed away in 2004, must have died a sad, broken hearted man to see what became of his beloved, former Rhodesia!
Posted by Ross at 5:26 PM on October 2
If Obama were “appointed” to office it would be a clear signal that our smiling members of congress intend to pick a crippled and looted America’s bones clean and then take to the lifeboats as the ship of state slips under the waves. This is what happens when people “elect” criminals and traitors to public office and then fail to hold them accountable for anything…
Posted by at 11:01 AM on October 3