How Ivory Coast's Gbabgo aims to solve his cash woes

After all, it's not like Ivory Coast's shuttered banks suffered bad leadership, spent too much money on bonuses or office rugs, or overexposed their shareholders to subprime housing loans. The banks lacked for money, not management.

2. Double-digit inflation while money disappears

"We also continue to think that inflation will soon be in double-digits," Mr. Gadio adds, offering a conundrum: Even as money becomes more cherished, it becomes more worthless.

That's partly because the country is running out of the things money buys even faster than it's running out of money.

Basic needs like cooking gas have become rarities in this country that has never knows the kind of week-long commodity shortages that routinely rock the West African neighborhood.

"Essential commodities," Eurasia Group's Africa analyst Anne Fruhauf says, "are fast becoming unaffordable."

3. How long will Gbagbo pay soldiers' salary?

Gbagbo's mission amid the macroeconomic math storm afoot is to make sure those essential commodities don't become unaffordable for his soldiers.

His government owes a monthly wage bill of $160 million. There's no slice of it more important than wages for the troops who keep Gbagbo in power – and his opponent barricaded in an Abidjan hotel.

Their payments are made by check – another scrap of hollow paper in this country of closed banks and empty drawers.

Even if they were delivered via scrumptious, envelope-sealed cash, it's hard to reckon how Gbagbo can scrounge together the salaries, as the country's main revenue source, cocoa exports, suffers from an international export ban.

"If salary payments don’t clear this month, the risk to his support base within the wider Civil Service and Army will begin to wear thin," Ms. Fruhauf says. "As we are already beginning to see, this severely raises the risk of street violence in the interim."

4. The birth of a new bill

Shunned by the bankers who print its currency, and surrounded by a praetorian guard with a payday coming, Gbagbo's best and boldest move may be to fire up the laser-jets and print new money from scratch.

Ergo, meet La Monnaie Iviorienne de la Resistance. Pale, wallop-sized "resistance currency" emblazoned with stuff like elephants, the bills come in units of hundreds today, but maybe hundreds of thousands tomorrow.

Gadio calls the pending bill "a practical option for Gbagbo's government," except that the new banknote and its elephant gewgaw "would also result in an hyperinflation spiral and make the new unit worthless."

It could also rupture new fault lines between hard-liners and moderates in the Gbagbo camp.

Why? Because, as a rule, elite government leaders who keep their bank accounts in a currency pegged to the euro, as Ivory Coast's currency is, don't like to convert their life savings into a banknote that, for the moment, primarily exists only on Google Image search.

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