Official sources said the recent 150 percent pay rise for soldiers, teachers, policemen and nurses had put a strain on money supply.
Reserve Bank officials told IRIN that plans to print about Zim$60 trillion (about US$592.9 million) were briefly delayed after the government failed to secure foreign currency to buy ink and special paper for printing money.
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “not worth the paper it’s printed on.”
This whole article almost reads like something from the Onion, it seems so absurd, but it seems to be a real story. Has any nation in recent history declined so far as the current Zimbabwe has from the Rhodesia of the sixties, then one of the richest nations on the African continent?
The Senate immigration bill extends Davis Bacon to private businesses. In addition to being a blatant violation of federalism (though sadly no more so than much other federal legislation), this would be a disaster for small businesses nationwide. Encourage your congressperson to kill it in the House.
Epstein in WSJ and Satel in NYT both say something needs to be done about kidneys (reversing the Ethicist’s stand). They both look to big payments to kidney sellers as a way to stop “6,500 excess deaths” due to lack of kidneys.
It is against the law to offer “valuable consideration”. Kidney buyers can take the matter into their own hands and not wait for a law change. Instead of a “valuable” consideration for a sold kidney, consider the following proposal:
Small payments to lots of prospective sellers upon death
A contract that pays a buyers organization a large sum of money from the estate if the organ sale is obstructed by family
It would work like life insurance in reverse. Kidney buyers would pay lots of people a consideration that doesn’t trigger the “valuable” language. In the absense of a kidney being delivered on death if one is available, the estate of the deceased would owe a payment. Some donors might sign the commitment without a consideration just to create a strong incentive for their family to honor their wishes with regard to donation.
The proposal is not sensitive to the needs of the grieving family, but I would rather have 3250 irate families than 6500 extra prematurely grieving ones due to a lack of kidneys.
The carbon emission offset market in Europe is in crisis because of an unexpected 50% price drop in the last couple of weeks. True to Europe, the traders are demanding government intervention to prop up the price(!) of carbon offsets. While it is true that the governments can afford to buy more, why would they want to? The high price of hydrocarbons will curb carbon emissions.
Assuming that the coal/methane/nuclear balance continues to move toward nuclear for electricity, high gasoline prices mean less carbon. So either we will run out of oil or we will have high CO2, not both.
This is really a shame, because in the context of modern lifestyles and medicine, he wasn’t that old. I was a devoted Wall Street Week fan for decades.
Despite his loss of the ultimate battle, I’ll always remember him as the eternal optimist, an attitude well justified by events.
According to this, pennies are now worth less than their cost of manufacture. My rule for getting rid of a coin is the point at which you can no longer purchase anything with a single one of it. In fact, at this point, with multi-hundred-thousand-dollar houses, and new cars costing over twenty thousand dollars, is there even anything that you can buy with a nickel any more?
Time to can the coin, and come up with some other way to honor Mr. Lincoln.