Sunday, January 18, 2009

There's Always a Reason for Mad Economic Policies


...and deep in the background it's often the Missus. Sometimes she just needs to go shopping---even in the very mad land of the z100 trillion dollar note, Zimbabwe.

UK's Times online reports:

Grace Mugabe, 43, known as the First Shopper of Zimbabwe, flew into a rage when she was spotted [by a photographer] last week leaving the exclusive Shangri-La hotel in Hong Kong. She has been staying there with her entourage at a cost of 2,000 a day...

Holding a Jimmy Choo-style bag estimated to be worth at least 2,000, and hiding behind Cavalli rhine-stone-framed glasses with a red cashmere shawl over her head, she ordered her bodyguard to attack the photographer...

While the guard tried to wrestle away Jones’s camera, she joined in the assault.

“The man held him while she hit him again and again in the face with her fists. She was screaming, completely crazy,” said Werner Zapletal, a tourist from Austria who witnessed the incident.

Jones, 42, suffered nine cuts, abrasions and bruises to the face and head caused by the heavy, diamond-encrusted rings Mugabe was wearing...

Mugabe and her female companion fled around a corner seeking to hide their faces, only to run straight into a second photographer, Tim O’Rourke. He snapped a few pictures before she flew at him with her fists flying, pulled his hair and tried to smash his camera...

Before she embarked on her Far East holiday at the beginning of January, Mugabe withdrew US$92,000 from the central bank in Harare, Zimbabwean sources said. Accompanied by her children, she stayed first at the Malaysian island resort of Langkawi. She then moved on to Singapore where she was joined by her husband for a few days...

Grace Mugabe is more than 40 years younger than her 84-year-old husband. Formerly his secretary and mistress, she finally married him in 1996 after the death of his wife of 30 years.
Holy sh#$%t. I think I would print z100 trillion dollar notes to keep this one calm.

At last report, z100 trillion is worth $US33, so to pull $US92,000 out of the Zimbabwe bank, for this shopping excursion, Robert Mugabe would have had to order up the printing of roughly 2,788 z100 trillion banknotes and have them converted to US dollars.

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