Mugabenomics

The hyperinflationary economic policy of Robert Mugabe.

Mugabenomics has been used for some years to describe the cause of Zimbabwe’s inexorable collapse, as meaningless zeros are added and subtracted from the Zimbabwean dollar while the population dies from malnutrition and cholera.

More recently, Mugabenomics has been used to describe Gordon Brown’s various rescue and stimulus packages, both in the British blogosphere, and now by the respected think-tank, The Adam Smith Institute:

Gordon Brown has reportedly said that the government must use simpler language about the credit crunch, because banking and financial-policy jargon just confuses everyone. Well, I can sum it up quite easily: we’re bust, and we’re going to print money to make ourselves feel richer.

Of course, [the British Chancellor] Alastair Darling has been denying for the last month that he’s … going to print money to get us out of this jam. He doesn’t want people to suspect that we are doing a Zimbabwe or a Weimar Republic – turning out so much cash that it soon becomes worthless. That would ruin savers and truly mess up the economy. Indeed, the mere threat that the government would risk it could make things worse – it would suggest that the situation was even worse than we feared, that the government was no longer creditworthy, and that everyone should sell Britain’s currency before it’s too late.