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Zimbabwe’s acting finance minister Patrick Chinamasa, commenting on what used to be called “dollarization,” the declaration that foreign currencies are legal tender: “[I]t requires a paradigm shift in terms of acknowledging the reality that we cannot eat what we do not have.” Independent Online (.za) offers some context:

The budget’s estimates of state expenditure were given in Zimbabwe dollars, US dollars and South African Rand. When he detailed government expenditure for last year, MPs laughed as he gave figures in thousands of quintillions of Zimbabwe dollars.

Viz.:

Keep laughing:

The controversial role of the central bank, with a declared policy of printing vast quantities of money and continually bailing out the government as it overspent, would “concentrate on its mandated policy by ensuring the stability of the financial sector.”

Wikipedia, “which is just like an encyclopedia only it’s more democratic about so-called ‘facts’” (tbogg), explains what comes next. Cecil Adams cites Dr. Math by way of offering additional context helpful for understanding the “special relationship”:

In the English speaking world, at least, there’s already disagreement about what the word “billion” means. In the United States, it means 109 [sic, i.e., 10e9]; in Great Britain, it means 1012 [sic]. The Brits add 6 zeroes per step up, and we add 3. So a British “trillion” is 1018 [sic]. In a sense, the British system makes more sense—billion, trillion, quadrillion, etc., indicate 2, 3, and 4 from the roots of the names. If you think of them as meaning 2, 3, and 4 groups of 6 zeroes, everything makes good sense—and it makes no sense in the U.S. system.”

Our number billion, I might add, is known in Britain as a “milliard.” The Germans, who evidently follow British practice, take it a step farther and use die Billiarde, which is the equivalent of quadrillion in the U.S.

VoexEU, “The Beginning of the end game…” (20 Sept ’08):

The key problem on this side of the Atlantic is that the largest European banks have become not only too big to fail but also too big to be saved. For example, the total liabilities of Deutsche Bank (leverage ratio over 50!) amount to around 2,000 billion euro, (more than Fannie Mai) or over 80% of the GDP of Germany. This is simply too much for the Bundesbank or even the German state to contemplate, given that the German budget is bound by the rules of the Stability pact and the German government cannot order (unlike the US Treasury) its central bank to issue more currency. The total liabilities of Barclays of around 1,300 billion pounds (leverage ratio over 60!) surpasses Britain’s GDP. Fortis bank, which has been in the news recently, has a leverage ratio of “only” 33, but its liabilities are several times larger than the GDP of its home country (Belgium).

Variously, see also: “Like printing money” (on the company that provides currency paper to the Zimbabwean central bank), “Currency design software” (on the risk of the currency-design software license being yanked).