Zimbabwe

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

On April 12, 2009, the government of Zimbabwe officially abandoned its currency.

You probably remember the stories; starting in the early 2000s, the Zimbabwe central bank began printing massive quantities of money in order for the government to make ends meet.

This resulted in one of the worst episodes of hyperinflation in modern history.

Zimbabwe’s rate of inflation in 2001 was more than 100%. Prices basically doubled.

One might think that after 92 years, some wisdom may have leaked into the brain of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe. But no. As the world's oldest head of state, he has overseen the demise from a post-colonial success to a pariah state wrecked by hyperinflation. However, having apparently learned no lesson from his prior experiences, The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has decided to print a new national currency for the first time since 2009.

As Simon Black pointed out a month ago, some people just don’t learn.

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of The Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

Most press reports about Zimbabwe’s fantastic hyperinflation are off the mark – way off the mark. Even our most trusted news sources fail to get the facts right. This confirms the “95 Percent Rule”: 95 percent of what you read in the financial press is either wrong or irrelevant.

When Jim Chanos said earlier this week that days ago that sub-Saharan Africa is facing a severe cash shortage (mostly as a result of their collapsing oil export revenue) he probably did not have the economic basket case of Zimbabwe in mind, and yet this is the country which, after years of monetary and economic collapse "problems", including the occasional bout of hyperinflation, finds itself in the most dire situation.

Submitted by Dave Forest via OilPrice.com,

Readers the world over are still busy crawling through information from the “Panama Papers” leak - which has revealed how high-profile persons around the globe used corporate havens to dodge taxes.

And in Zimbabwe, they’re turning their attention to one particular name leaked in the documents: the country’s largest platinum miner.