Mugabe’s currency supplier turns off the spigot

The Wall Street Journal has the scoop: the German factory that has been supplying half of Mugabe’s banknotes is cutting him off: The notes, which have allowed Mr. Mugabe to pay his soldiers and other loyalists, are produced by Giesecke & Devrient GmbH, a secretive, family-owned Bavarian company that once made its money churning out ...

The Wall Street Journal has the scoop: the German factory that has been supplying half of Mugabe's banknotes is cutting him off:

The Wall Street Journal has the scoop: the German factory that has been supplying half of Mugabe’s banknotes is cutting him off:

The notes, which have allowed Mr. Mugabe to pay his soldiers and other loyalists, are produced by Giesecke & Devrient GmbH, a secretive, family-owned Bavarian company that once made its money churning out worthless cash in the 1920s for the doomed Weimar Republic.

On Friday, the German government ordered Giesecke & Devrient to desist, and today the company complied. Giesecke & Devrient, one of two  suppliers of Zimbabwe, is the world’s second-largest printer of banknotes, and it has a history of working with odious regimes (Hitler, Franco, and Ian Smith of Rhodesia, to name a few). The company had been providing blank notes, and the central bank in Harare was adding all the zeroes.

If Mugabe had any sense, he’d seize this opportunity to tame his country’s hyperinflation by taking currency out of the economy. But as Johns Hopkins University economist Steve H. Hanke tells the WSJ, Zimbabwe’s central bank is more likely to find a workaround, and keep churning out those bills.

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