Paul Wood, Spectator: What happens when your currency collapses?
The Lebanese are living through a terrible economic experiment
I’m a millionaire. A million in crisp, new bills is stacked up on the table in front of me. Unfortunately, it’s Lebanese lira and cost me about $75 a week ago. It’s already worth only $65, and by the time you read this, it will be worth even less.
The Lebanese currency has lost more than 90 percent of its value over the past 18 months and is continuing its steady decline. It would be foolish to keep more than a few days’ spending money on hand, so everyone has a moneychanger. Mine is Mohammed, who pops round on his moped with ever-fatter stacks of notes with ever more zeros on them. The currency grows physically as it shrinks in value. He passes over a wad of cash and says, smiling: ‘Our leaders are stupid and corrupt.’
That’s true, but only part of the story of what has gone wrong. Mohammed is here because no one uses the banks to change money anymore. That would be crazy when the official exchange rate is still 1,500 lira to the dollar, one-tenth of the black-market rate of just over 15,000 to the dollar (at the time of writing). Mohammed used to be a chef, a job where he made things that people wanted, adding a small but tangible amount to the nation’s wealth. Now he’s one of thousands of people employed in the completely useless but absolutely indispensable business of ferrying stacks of printed paper back and forth by moped, to make up for the catastrophic failure of the banking system. It’s one small example of the inefficiencies that creep into an economy when you can’t trust the money anymore.
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WNU Editor: I lived through the experience of a currency collapse in the early 1990s when the Russian ruble was destroyed because of inflation. I would not recommend anyone to go through that hell.
The Joe Biden currency collapse
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ReplyDeleteWNU,
So what did you do when you to buy something?
ReplyDeleteLet me retype...so what did you do when you had to buy something?
But this isn’t exonerating in the least. Barr is unintentionally admitting that he ordered a highly controversial change in department policy — one designed to insulate the department from getting drawn into disputes over election outcomes — even though he had already concluded there was no basis to the election fraud claims.
ReplyDelete“He’s essentially admitting that he opened the door to criminal prosecutions, and changed long-standing policy that was there for the protection of elections, without any basis in evidence,” Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me.
This is “really problematic and very disturbing," Bookbinder said.
The least charitable interpretation here is that Barr ordered the shift to sustain Trump’s narrative of a fraudulent election. Barr, of course, already had a history of using the department to prop up Trump’s political narratives, having released a highly misleading summary of the special counsel report that allowed Trump to spin exoneration.
Yes, Barr ultimately did admit there was not substantial election fraud, but he hedged, saying there wasn’t enough to swing the outcome. And he said this after it had become unavoidably obvious that Trump’s court challenges would fail.
The more charitable interpretation is that Barr greenlighted election fraud investigations merely to arm himself to contest Trump’s pressure to demonstrate that his loss was illegitimate. But even if so, the shift was still made to placate Trump.
“Even if you accept his motive, it was not that he was doing this for the good of the country and to protect the integrity of elections,” Bookbinder told me. “It’s still driven by what Trump says and what Trump wants, which is inherently an improper basis for changing policy on what prosecutors can look into.”
All of which opens the door to further inquiry. One possibility might be for Congress to demand documents from the department relating to this policy shift, to try to show the lack of any serious predicate for it or internal deliberation demonstrating it was baseless.
“We are considering further investigation of this, and Congress should as well,” Bookbinder told me.
This comes as a Democratic investigation has already unearthed a host of new documents showing that Trump went to extraordinary lengths on other fronts to pressure the department into helping subvert the election. There’s likely a lot more to unearth.
McConnell looks even worse
On another front, Barr told Karl that McConnell had privately urged him to go public all along with the truth about fake election fraud. McConnell didn’t want to publicly take on Trump, fearing it would imperil GOP chances in the Georgia runoffs.
McConnell did this, Karl reports, even though he believed Trump’s lies were “damaging to the country." As Rick Hasen and Quinta Jurecic point out, this shows McConnell asked Barr to use the department for the purpose of managing a GOP political problem and that McConnell spent weeks refusing to acknowledge Trump’s loss while knowing this was hurting the country.
But here again, it’s even worse than this. Recall that both GOP candidates in Georgia endorsed that Texas lawsuit to overturn the results based on fictions, and both supported GOP efforts to invalidate President Biden’s electors in Congress.
There is little chance this wasn’t done in consultation with McConnell, to keep Trump voters engaged. We now know this happened despite McConnell concluding that feeding Trump’s election lies was hurting the country. Indeed, moves like that surely helped inspire the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The real upshot of Barr’s exoneration tour is that it strengthens the case for a fuller fumigation of Trump’s effort to subvert the election — and his bone-deep corruption of the government to help him do it.
Lapides at 10:59 off topic with another copy and paste of an entire article.
ReplyDeleteAnon 10:56
ReplyDeleteI was working in Canada at the time. To make ends meet for everyone back home I ended up working and doing business deals non-stop seven days a week for a few years. Thank God for Western Union that made it possible to send money back home. It was also during this time that everything was up for sale in Russia, and if you had foreign cash it was super cheap. My ability to obtain funds in Canada and elsewhere helped lay the base for the family business in real estate to start and grow.
But the personal cost of working like that (and for that long) was terrible.