Wealth & Money Quote by Marc Faber

Faber’s line lands like a blunt instrument because it collapses a whole macroeconomic horror story into a kitchen-table sequence: print, devalue, suffer, explode. As a market veteran, he’s not aiming for academic nuance; he’s issuing a trader’s warning shot. “Like in Zimbabwe” isn’t a neutral example, it’s a rhetorical shortcut - a brand name for hyperinflation that cues images of wheelbarrows of cash and salaries that become jokes by lunchtime. The specificity is the point: he wants policymakers and investors to feel how quickly “technical” decisions turn into social breakdown.

The intent is partly pedagogical, partly political. By framing money creation as “printing,” he leans into the popular, visceral metaphor that central banks hate, because it implies recklessness and shortcut thinking. Subtext: elites can call it quantitative easing, emergency stimulus, or liquidity support; ordinary people experience it as rents jumping, food prices biting, and savings evaporating. Inflation becomes a tax that hits the least protected first, then corrodes trust in institutions.

The escalation to civil war is doing strategic work. It’s not a forecast so much as a moral ultimatum: economic mismanagement isn’t just inefficient, it’s destabilizing. Zimbabwe stands in for the endgame when credibility collapses - currency becomes a referendum on the state itself. Faber’s real target is complacency in rich countries: the belief that their institutions are too sophisticated for “that kind of outcome.” He’s reminding readers that legitimacy is, in part, a monetary promise, and broken promises don’t stay confined to spreadsheets.