Russell Lamberti
speaker
19 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2014
last heard Dec 2014
Russell Lamberti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Having adopted US dollars, they are now forced to trade in physical dollar notes, of which there's a finite amount within Zimbabwe.
And in fact, many of those dollar notes are physically becoming so worn out that
that there's even some marginal money destruction.
And so you've got, in many respects, the opposite of what you had prior to 2009, whereas there you had significant money printing, you've got almost no money supply growth and possibly even money supply shrinkage.
And so that's leading to these very low rates of inflation and even deflation.
The overall picture is much more favorable for Zimbabweans than it was prior to 2009.
They can actually...
understand what prices they're going to pay and reasonably expect those prices to stay at those levels for sensible periods of time.
But of course, it does also start to create certain challenges.
If you have become highly indebted over the last few years and you are paying an interest rate that's higher than, say, 3% or 4%, deflation can start to really hurt you.
On the other hand, poorer people love deflation because it makes things affordable for them.
So there are winners and losers on both sides of the inflation and deflation equation.
And I don't think that low levels of deflation are particularly economically harmful for Zimbabwe.
If anything, I think it can be a boon for consumers who are poor and under considerable pressure.
They're in a fantastic position to adopt a free currency zone, a free market currency zone and potentially be at the cutting edge, ironically, of monetary progress which is potentially adopting the use of cryptocurrencies.
various online payments and trading mechanisms.
And in fact, in Zimbabwe, there's pretty sophisticated mobile technology.
Many, many people are connected, and it's a tremendously viable mechanism of payment.
So as I say, it's well within their grasp, and I think it just needs a sensible and friendly regulatory regime, which unfortunately doesn't exist at the present moment, but change is certainly within Zimbabwe's grasp.
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