"There is not sufficient foreign currency to release 1,200bn [krona] in foreign currency," said Benedikt Gíslason, an advisor to the government on capital controls.
Indeed, Kennedy's famous public airing of the photographs showing cleared palms and vehicle tracks scored into the earth still had sufficient public currency to have been mimicked by Colin Powell when asserting graphic evidence of Iraq's WMD to the UN in February 2003.
The financial excesses of the country's elite are well documented, and Pyongyang lacks sufficient foreign currency reserves to make up for the shortfall.
The government struggled to provide manufacturers with sufficient foreign currency at subsidized rates, leading many to stop producing disposable diapers and sanitary products entirely, leaving a smaller, costlier inventory on store shelves.
It says it has sufficient foreign-currency reserves to cover six weeks of imports (ie, about $150m).
A contraction in the local economy or an adverse change in the exchange rate means that the sovereign or the private sector is unable to obtain foreign currency sufficient to pay off the debt.
Ksenia Yudayeva, deputy chairman of the central bank, tried to reassure traders by saying there was sufficient liquidity in currency markets and that the bank had prepared new economic forecasts based on a price of $60 a barrel.
Since the Chávez-led government gained control of the national oil company in 2003, this disastrous economic performance has been transformed, with one of the highest growth rates in the region, a dramatic reduction in debt and an accumulation of currency reserves sufficient to offer significant protection from fluctuations in oil prices.
The announcement, which demonstrates the Bank of Japan's belief that there is already a sufficient supply of its currency in the market, sent the dollar plunging nearly 3% against the yen about an hour after the Japanese stock market closed on Tuesday.
Unfortunately a thin veneer of currency isn't sufficient to revitalize a drama that feels positively quaint, despite Mr. Vidal's winking cynicism about the political arena and his undeniable prescience about future trends in American politicking.
