Zimbabwe Tackles Cash Crunch (BBC): “Zimbabwe is taking its highest-value banknote out of circulation in the face of an economic crisis that has led to long queues outside banks and the widespread hoarding of cash. Finance Minister Herbert Murerwa has said the Z$500 note is to be withdrawn within 60 days, hoping to get people to deposit their notes and replenish the banks with much-needed cash. It will then be replaced with a new version, as well as with the country’s first Z$1,000 denomination. Zimbabweans have been left with an urgent need for cash owing to runaway inflation which is heading towards 400% and soaring foreign exchange rates. The Z$700m a day being printed despite dire shortages of both ink and paper is being grabbed as fast as it can be produced.- Japan’s Unique Snow and Intestines Argument (Pesek, Bloomberg): “Tokyo mulled slapping barriers on imports of foreign skis, claiming Japan’s snow was different. Its restrictions on foreign beef imports were based on the contention that Japanese intestines were different. Now Fukui is making a similar point about Japan’s economics: it’s different, so foreign ideas are no help. Just one problem with all this: Economics isn’t geographically specific. The Austrian school doesn’t only discuss the economics of a small economy in central Europe.”
- To Save Lives, Inventors Had to Change Minds (USAToday): “Frustrated that so many victims of sudden cardiac arrest were dying needlessly, they quit their jobs 10 years ago to start a company that would force a big, lifesaving change on the medical community. Before going into business, they worked for Physio-Control, a Seattle-area company that makes defibrillators used mostly by emergency workers to shock quivering hearts back to a normal rhythm. Their idea: make one so small, inexpensive and easy to use that any bystander — even a child — could use one in an emergency. Their company, Heartstream, was a success. Today, partly because of their invention, hundreds and perhaps thousands of lives are saved annually by ordinary people aboard airplanes, in homes and at other places outside hospitals.
- Reconstruction of Iraq to Cost $7.3 Billion (this year) (WashTimes): “Bush administration officials yesterday pegged this year’s costs for relief and reconstruction in Iraq at $7.3 billion but refused to project expenses for the next fiscal year or further in the future. ’We don’t know what they will be,’ Joshua Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”
- Higher Rates Erode Mortgage Demand (Reuters): “A rise in interest rates dampened demand for home mortgage refinancings and loans for home purchases last week, an industry survey reported on Wednesday. The drop in demand diminishes the key support that housing has provided the U.S. economy in recent years. Rates for 30-year loans, the most commonly used home mortgage, rose to 5.87 percent in the latest week from 5.72 percent in the previous week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association of America.”
- State Funding of Political Parties: Afari Gyan Give Up! (Accra Daily Mail, Ghana): “These are not issues you simply throw money at. In discussing the pre-requisites for human action in his seminal book, “Human Action”, Ludwig von Mises has this to say, ‘We call contentment or satisfaction or utter despair [sic] that state of a human being which does not and cannot result in action. Acting man is eager to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory. His mind imagines conditions, which suits him better, and his action aims at bringing about his desired state.’...Thus the only viable solution is for our political leadership to collectively energize the political space into action, not by money, but by giving them a reason to be interested in their own welfare.”
Posted by Mises.org News
