Cash barons – and the rest of Zimbabwe’s feudal hierarchy – explained
What is a ‘Cash Baron’? How does one become so? Does the King knight you? Is it a hereditary title, or is earned by you alone during your life? And is there a pecking order? King, Lord, Duke, Baron, Earl, Knight (of the bath, of the garter, of the $500 000 note, of the running sewage?) Squire . . .
How much do you need to get to each level? Does a Lord have $ 765 quadrillion in cash? And then a Duke has $ 852 trillion billion, a Baron $ 573 million billion, an Earl $445 million million and a knight (venerable order of the overflowing raw sewerage pipe) a hundred million? And the rest of us multi millionaires are venal peasants? Owing homage, soccage (or scrutage), or ‘you must stop for the sirenage’?
If you can print as much as you want (or more than you can possibly dream of), then you are the King, and if you do the printing you are the King’s flunky.
This is, of course, why we cannot ‘dollarise’. The King cannot print those. And since they have destroyed the economy, there is no revenue coming in (pay tax on what?) so you have to print the money to pay the army so it will not rise up and kill you. Did anyone else but me learn of the ‘diamonds and water syndrome’ for ‘A’ level economics? I have it all wrong of course, but that is the fault of illegal western sanctions.