BEN THE ALMIGHTY pictures

When debts are piling and the coffers are empty Gideon Gono, the country bumpkin Governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, a man with a bizarre fetish for the pungent smell of ink cartridge, gets down and dirty with the bare equipment, churning note after shiny note of worthless currency. He is rightly condemned as a money-printing maverick of the Iron Age era.

Across the Atlantic, faced with a similar predicament Ben Bernanke, the City slicker Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve, digs deep into his bag of tricks. Instead of dusting up his Epsom LaserJet printer, the bearded computer geek punches his keyboard in anger and bellows out, “Let there be money!”

Instantly there is money everywhere, enough to mop up all the toxic assets in Wall Street. He calls it quantitative easy. Surprisingly, Boy Ben is hailed as a pragmatic visionary. True, many have assailed the man with a plethora of charges, but even his harshest critics are not prepared to accuse him of the more dangerous taboo of money-printing. It seems some men have all the luck.