Black Friday

Once again the Federal government, in cooperation with the Serbian and Montenegrin governments promised to fulfill all its promises: on Tuesday all the dailies brought headlines saying that the three governments were meeting in order to reach an agreement on measures of economic policy aimed at curbing hyperinflation, increasing production, organizing the supply of the population...

The next day, the papers said that the Federal government, once again in agreement with the republican governments, was announcing urgent economic measures in order to regulate economic developments by the end of the year. The official announcement ended with: ``It has been agreed that by the end of this, or, at the latest, by the beginning of next week, a new meeting will be held at which an agreement will be reached with regard to concrete measures and instruments for the second half of the current year.''

Such announcements, judging by a cursory glance through the newspapers, are made every few days. For example, three days before the announcement of a meeting of the three prime ministers, the public was calmed down with information to the effect that the Federal government would work over the weekend. On Sunday, August 8, only a very naive person could have felt sorry for Federal Prime Minister Kontic whose salary stands at 55 DM.

The Federal government started the weekend without a break in a day during which hard currency rates in the streets went up by 25%. As before, the price of hard currency jumped when a larger quantity of dinars hit the streets. A new 100,000,000 dinars bill was put into circulation on Friday, bearing the signature of the new National Bank Governor, who had promised that he would inundate the market with dinars. Namely, the day before, the grey primary issue went into operation: ``reliable state companies'' such as the railway company received 120,000 billion dinars, state television received 80,000 billion and so on.

If it doesn't sound too pathetic, it should be said that that same Friday was Miners' Day. The miners in Bor celebrated it by waiting for their salaries but not getting them, because the local commercial bank had received only 150 billion dinars instead of the necessary seven thousand billion dinars. The situation wasn't much different at other commercial banks, or rather their branches: there were queues of people everywhere trying to get their money, but not getting any, or only the smallest possible sums.

In order to get some idea of what it means to be favored by the Central Bank, i.e. the state, it must be borne in mind that July salaries for all those employed in Serbia's health services totalled around one billion million dinars; the pensioners' monthly fund covering some 1,200,000 pensioners received the same amount of money after a nine time increase of June pensions. A temporary epilogue could be summed up as: the pensioners are quiet, a strike of those working in health institutions has started in Kragujevac, among other things because they were offered 10% of their salaries in the first payment instead of the 60% they had asked for.

With this experience in mind, it is not surprising that the Serbian government, chamber of economy and the trade unions have once again corrected the sum allotted for July's minimal wages.

The next increase of the minimal wage sum has been announced in a week's time, which means that a certain number of people will continue receiving empty promises instead of money.

Whoever tries to put together a mosaic from the bits of information given so far, will come close to answering the question why the governments hesitate to face all that is meant by hyperinflation. There is no other answer other than that they have no intention of doing so, or rather that they are faced with the impossible task of curbing hyperinflation and enabling production while at the same time tolerating the uncontrolled printing of dinars, and their controlled distribution. This is why when ``urgent measures of economic policy'' are finally announced, they will include the control of everything except the printing of dinars.