Fake Diploma? Be Ecuador's Next CenBank Chief!

Ah, Ecuador...the archetypal banana republic. For a country that supposedly loathes the United States via its leader Rafael Correa and his assorted (dubious) leftist stylings, it is pitiful that Ecuador has no real monetary policy of its own since it has adopted the US dollar as its currency. Call me naive, but I think thundering about the evils of capitalism and Western imperialism falls flat when you choose to keep the United States' currency as your own. Dollarization is not compatible with anti-imperialism in my books. Towards the end of last year we received even more outlandish news about fraud and fakery in Ecuadorean monetary circles. True, there isn't much for you to do as the central bank governor of a dollarized economy alike being in charge of Marian devotion at a Protestant church.

So little is there to do that it turns out that Correa's cousin Pedro Delgado--I guess Ecuadorean socialism like the Cuban variant does away with Marxist abhorrence of patrimonialism--became central bank governor with a fake college degree:

It seems in every family there are secrets and lies. On Wednesday afternoon, Pedro Delgado, the cousin of Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, and the Andean country’s central bank president, stepped down after confessing that he did not hold a university degree in economics. “I submit my irrevocable resignation as head of the central bank… and I do it because I made a grave mistake 22 years ago,” Delgado said.

He has been facing accusations in recent weeks in the local media, so he finally admitted that in order to be accepted at a business school to read for an MBA, he “presented a document with no value that certified that I had a degree that I did not hold. And I kept that in secret.”

Does anyone really care if you have a fake degree as the chief of a fake central bank while propounding fake socialism? The plasticity of it all is astounding. A grave injustice has been done to a truly representative man of modern-day Ecuador.

PS: Trivia buffs will appreciate that Delgado was ranked the world's worst central bank governor before resigning.