Autocratas de todo o mundo: as leis que regem todas as coisas reduzirão as vossas a pó
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One month after Mugabe commanded merchants nationwide to counter 10,000-percent-a-year hyperinflation by slashing prices by half and more, Zimbabwe's economy is at a halt.
Essentials like bread, sugar and cornmeal, staples of every Zimbabwean's diet, have vanished, seized by mobs of bargain-hunters who denuded stores like locusts in wheat fields. Meat is nonexistent. Gasoline is nearly unobtainable. Hospital patients are dying for lack of basic medical supplies. Power blackouts and water cutoffs are endemic.
Manufacturing has slowed to a crawl, because few businesses can produce goods for less than their government-imposed sale prices. Raw materials are drying up because suppliers are being forced to sell to factories at a loss. Businesses are laying off workers or reducing their hours.
Zimbabwe's economy has been shrinking since 2000, buffeted by political turmoil, capital flight and mismanagement. Never has it been in a more dire state than now, business executives say.

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Zimbabwe's vast underclass, the majority of its 10 or 11 million people, is perhaps less affected by this latest economic shock, simply because it has long been unable to afford most food anyway. The rural poor survive on whatever they can grow.

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Rather, it is the middle class, which had muddled through the last seven years of decline, that is likely to feel the brunt. Factory layoffs and slowdowns are bringing new poverty to the 15 percent or 20 percent of adult Zimbabweans who still have jobs. Pensioners, whose fixed incomes already have been gutted by hyperinflation, now find that no amount of money can purchase some staples.
Private doctors said in interviews that diseases of poverty, including tuberculosis and malnutrition, are starting to appear among their patients, including the minority whites who once comprised the wealthy class."

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Mais sobre o convidado de honra da Cimeira UE-África pode ser lido aqui.

Isto foi rápido, como previsto
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Do Financial Times:

Shelves lay empty in some of Harare’s main supermarkets on July 2, with bread and milk, in particular, hard to find following last week’s demand by President Robert Mugabe’s government that retailers halve prices of basic goods.
Rather than risk arrest by the police, some retailers have cut prices and run down stocks, but others have maintained prices in the face of renewed threats from the government.
On July 2 Vice-President Joseph Msika, standing in for Mr Mugabe while he attends an African Union summit in Ghana, reaffirmed the government’s threat to take over manufacturers who failed to comply with the pricing directives aimed at reducing an official inflation rate of 4,500 per cent.
A number of supermarkets reported chaotic scenes as they were forced by police and government price inspectors to empty stockrooms and sell products at cut prices. Bakers have slashed bread production and supermarkets who had any deliveries at all sold their supplies early.

Não é a História que se repete
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É a estupidez dos homens. No Financial Times de ontem:
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President Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's ruinous president, is no student of economic history. Last Wednesday he ordered factories and shops to slash prices by 50 per cent - returning them to the level of Monday, the week before last.

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The Emperor Diocletian - famous for miserliness and his persecution of Rome's Christian minority - tried this trick in AD301. Like Zimbabwe, Rome had a hyperinflation. To halt it Diocletian decreed that all prices should halve and then set maximum prices for many basic goods (from 2 denarii for Egyptian beer up to 150,000 for a lion). Violations were punishable by death.

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But Diocletian kept minting coins. "Then much blood was shed for the veriest trifles; men were afraid to expose anything to sale, and the scarcity became more excessive and grievous than ever," is how Lactantius, a historian of the times, described the result of fixing prices while continuing to increase the amount of money.

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Mr Mugabe need not even debase the coinage to achieve the same calamitous effect: he has the printing press, a more efficient tool of monetary destruction. Nor need he bother with the death penalty when bully boys linked to his Zanu-PF party can be dispatched to punish opponents. But the misery of Zimbabwe's citizens will be no less.

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Even during a hyperinflation, paper money is useful: it is a medium of exchange, it lets a complex economy function. But if goods cannot be sold for a fair price then nobody will sell them; they will turn to barter instead, and trade what little they can scavenge or produce for bread. Then Zimbabwe's inflation will enter a different, dangerous, final phase. Once the monetary economy collapses the government will have no way to pay its civil servants or its soldiers.

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The Emperor Diocletian survived his hyperinflation, ruled for 21 years and then retired to Croatia to grow cabbages. Zimbabwe's people can only hope that Mr Mugabe's own supporters dispose of him in time to restore some economic sanity to their suffering country.