Posted on 06/07/2012 4:32:12 AM PDT by Haiku Guy
Thursday may be the final test for the euro zone, Vincent Cignarella argues on Markets Hub. The simmering euro-zone crisis may reach full boil when Spain goes to the market to borrow bonds just one day after the ECB met.
I was in Somalia back in the mid-80s. I was talking to an economist who had a meeting with the Somali Minister of Long Term Economic Planning while the country was going through one of it's many monetary emergencies.
The crux of the problem was the printer in Italy who printed Somali Shillings demanded to be paid in hard currency. After all, he could print all the Somali Shillings he wanted, so what is the point of being paid in those? The government did not have the money to pay the printer, so there was simply no cash in the country to deal with the 100%-per-week inflation.
Finally the government got money from somebody to pay the printer, and the cash was shipped from Italy. It was scheduled to arrive in a couple of days. It was at his regular Sunday meeting that the Somali Minister of Long-Term Economic Planning spoke the famous line, "If we can just make it through Tuesday, we'll be fine."
We all had a good laugh about that at the time. Silly wogs, and all that. Little did we know that the crisis for us would come on a Thursday.
I heard a similar story. In the version I heard the African country told the printing company to, “Just run off a few million for yourselves.”
If they can only make it to August when they’re all on their 5 week vacations, nobody will notice the collapse. ;)
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