Posted on 12/12/2005 2:57:13 PM PST by vikingd00d
HARARE - The Zimbabwe government plans to introduce new regulations to allow it to temporarily borrow from foreign currency accounts (FCAs) of private organisations and individuals, in yet another desperate bid to lay its hands on whatever little hard cash is available in the country, ZimOnline has learnt.
Sources within the central Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) said the proposed new regulation that they said could be announced early next year would bring FCAs held by individuals and others such as non-governmental organisations within reach of President Robert Mugabe's hard cash-strapped government.
If implemented as planned, the move would widen the sources of hard cash for the internationally-isolated Mugabe government, currently battling fuel, power and basic commodity shortages due to lack of foreign currency.
"The bank (RBZ) is currently working on the modalities of implementing the scheme. Details will be announced early in the New Year," said a senior RBZ official, who asked to remain anonymous.
It is envisaged that the government, through the central bank, would use the scheme to borrow funds from the FCAs which would be repaid after some time but with interest.
No comment could be obtained yesterday from RBZ governor Gideon Gono or Finance Minister Herbert Murerwa.
Zimbabwe has faced acute foreign currency shortages since the International Monetary Fund (IMF) withdrew balance-of-payments support in 1999 following disagreements with Mugabe's government over fiscal policy and other governance issues.
Several other international money lenders, donors and development agencies, taking a cue from the IMF, have since suspended relations with the Harare administration.
Mugabe's chaotic and often violent farm seizure programme, launched a year after the IMF withdrew assistance, exacerbated Zimbabwe's foreign currency and economic crisis by destabilising the agricultural sector, the backbone of the economy.
Zimbabwe, with an annual inflation rate of 502.4 percent and unemployment of over 70 percent, has been described by the World Bank as the fastest-shrinking economy in the world outside a war zone.
The southern African nation, once a regional economic star, has seen export earnings this year decline by 6.4 percent to US$157 million while imports also fell by 2.6 percent to US$193 million, according to Murerwa, who last week presented the country's 2006 national budget statement.
Murerwa's figures point to a contracting economy, barely able to meet its day-to-day import requirements.
Harare survived censure from the IMF in September after making last-minute payments of its arrears to the Bretton Woods institution which was on the verge of expelling the country from the Fund.
Fuel and food shortages coupled with hyperinflation have scuttled all efforts to resuscitate the economy after more than six years in the wilderness. - ZimOnline
Zimbabwe deserves whatever happens to it. The blacks drove out the whites with glee in the hopes of seizing the white-owned farms and then they were betrayed from their own acts of thievery when Mugabe and his minions came along to pillage the farms first.
Let them starve and wallow in their mess of their own making.
Remove your money from the country and yourselves as well. It is over.
I would have thought they were already proficient in theft! Maybe it's a matter of the proper attire?
I wonder how he can borrow ? his FICO score must really suck.
Brilliant move. This will help immensely.
Why Mugabe and his ZANU moron thugs are not yet room temperature is beyond me.
Yeah. Sure it will.
"Never" is some time; lots of it.
Another toss out the white government and put in the majority black government that knew absolutely nothing about money, how to run a government, how to run an economy. A government set up to make this pig wealthy by stealing land and now starves his country because they have no one able to even farm, as they took over the white farms. Right. Call whites racists? This pig is as big a racist as there is. But, of course, we all know that "people of color" cannot be racists, only whites can. /sarcasm still on.
John Dillinger had a lousy credit rating too, but banks seemed to be willing to let him have some money anyway. And for pretty much the same reason.
On the other hand, why would anyone still have money of any type in a Zimbabwe bank? Was it impossible to withraw it and get it out of the country (or at least buried somewhere) in the past ten year?
If I remember correctly at least one Arkansas public employees retirement fund was a kind of slush fund for BJ and there's "The Clinton Pension Grab." See the Executive Summary of the Joint Economic Committee, 1995
http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/eti/grab.htm
"The Clinton Administration has launched a behind the scenes, incremental strategy to fund its social agenda by tapping into the $3.5 trillion private pension system."
If I remember corectly BJ wanted a "one-time only" 25 percent payment from the private retirement funds.
Hey, there might still be a tiny glimmer of activity left in Zimbabwe's once flourishing economy. Can't have that! You would thing that after a hundred years Communists would get at least half a clue regarding basic economics but no dice.
Mugabe: Smashing prosperity with the iron fist of socialism!
As long as they are a "legitimate government", they might even be able to access accounts held in foreign banks by their citizens.
What would stop them ? Would a US bank, or a French bank honor a "legal" court order from Zimbabwe to place an account held by a Zimbabwe national into some sort of "escrow" status where Zimbabwe could borrow from it ?
I don't know the answer. But it makes you wonder about the fading banking secrecy laws, doesn't it ? At the rate the world is eliminating them, whatever nationality you are, your mother country (and a host of their treaty partners, probably) will be able to find it and get their grubby hands on it.
Don't hold your breath. Get your money out now if you can.
The place would be in far better shape if Mugabe would stop getting his economic policy from the DNC.
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FrontPageMag had an article about Ethiopia's Mengistu and he did exactly, nearly, what Mugabe has been doing. The two know each other well.
How classic is it? Well, Karl Marx himself complained bitterly that the Paris Commune fell because it failed to sieze the banks. That was 1871. This stuff has been going on for a long, long time.
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