UnNews:World cabbage crisis worsens
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Where man always bites dog | ✪ | UnNews | ✪ | Tuesday, December 3, 2024, 17:29:59 (UTC) |
World cabbage crisis worsens |
6 October 2010
SEOUL, South Korea -- The worldwide cabbage crisis has gotten steadily worse.
Speculators are buying up all the cabbage in the world, on the assumption that, when the current coordination between national banks is complete and all the world's currencies become worthless, people will start trading using cabbage instead of money.
Here in South Korea, the price of a head of cabbage has reached $10. (That is 11,500 dog, the local currency that is leading the way toward worthlessness.) The problem is that cabbage is a staple of the local diet. Some South Koreans proudly eat cabbage, in the form of kimchi, three times a day, often with a small side dish of silicon chips. For roughage. The succulent spheroid is almost as popular in the South as tree bark is, up North.
Cabbage threatens to be an unwieldy form of money, but experts say the marketplace can cope. Park Young-koo, a South Korean government economist, says "Germany had a period where shoppers needed a wheelbarrow of banknotes to buy groceries. But this was a brief episode in the country's history, and it was not long before the trains ran on time, so to speak."
In the United States, NASA has banned cabbage from the menu on flights of the Space Shuttle. The desire to conserve funds during the era of huge budget deficits, and especially to hoard the vegetable that is on its way to becoming the new global currency, is the obvious reason, although the agency insists it merely wants to avoid the production of flammable methane in-flight.
With the same excuse, NASA has also banned broccoli, a vegetable that went out of favor during the term of George H. W. Bush. This suggests that the U.S. envisages a dual-currency standard, or bi-vegetablism, after the collapse.
Sources[edit]
- Justin Rohrlich "Kimchi Shortage Rocks South Korea, Frantic Government Lifts Tariffs on Cabbage Imports". Minyanville, October 5, 2010
- Justin Rohrlich "Why NASA Banned Cabbage, Broccoli From Flight Menus". Minyanville, October 4, 2010