Courtesy of Vox Day, here’s an article that should tickle Da Bernank’s funnybone good and proper:

Zimbabwe’s finance minister has taken
a hard look at the cash strapped country’s bank accounts – and
discovered it only has £138 and 34 pence left.

Tendai
Biti made the announcement at press conference yesterday declaring:
‘Last week when we paid civil servants there was $217 in government
coffers.’

Mr Biti went
on to tell the shocked news reporters that they were individually likely
to have healthier bank balances than the state’s.

‘The government finances are in paralysis state at the present moment’, Mr Biti admitted.

However, Mr Biti today contradicted his claims by saying that the poor state of the country’s finances only lasted a day.

Speaking to the BBC, he said the following day about $30m of revenue was paid into the government’s accounts.

Mr Biti claims he made the remarkable revelations to highlight that the government could not finance the constitutional referendum and election that are planned for sometime later this year.

Speaking to the BBC’s Focus on Africa
radio programme, he claimed his statement had been misreported.

He said:
‘You journalists are mischievous and malicious – the point I was making
was that the Zimbabwean government doesn’t have the funds to finance
the election, to finance the referendum,’ he said.

Keynesian stupidity doesn’t get more ridiculous than this. By the way, the Keynesian solution to a prolonged inflationary depression- hey, isn’t that kind of like what we have right now?!- is to spend and print, spend and print, and then spend and print some more. There is a reason why I hold Keynesians in such utter contempt- their entire “framework” is based on bad logic, absurd applications of mathematical principles, and outright lies. And it just doesn’t matter how much you try to school them in correct thinking; their entire worldview is predicated on a book that is as unreadable as it is logically and factually incorrect, so the moment you try to call them on their stupidity, they resort to smokescreen tactics by pointing to the original work (which they themselves haven’t read, for the most part, as it happens).

There’s an even funnier bit later on in the article where Zimbabwe’s inflation rate is estimated at 230 million percent. Seriously. I didn’t realise numbers even went that high, at least in real life.

Note also that last paragraph in the quote above- the Zimbabwean government doesn’t have enough money to finance its own elections. Personally I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing; elections in Africa are less about rights and democracy and more about electing the candidate who promises the most gifts to the people at the expense of “everyone else”. It’s an amusing idea though- can you imagine how hilarious it would be if Tiny Tim Geithner went on national television and said that the 2016 elections were suspended because the US Treasury has run out of people to buy its bonds, and now if you’ll excuse him he needs to go back to his luxury yacht to enjoy some much-needed downtime?