Barack Obama Naked

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Only a few decades ago, Nauru, a small pacific island nation, had one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world. Birds of the sea had flown around Nauru crapping on it for thousands of years, leaving the island with rich phosphate deposits. Their small population (under 14,000) ensured that the country’s few citizens would enjoy an enormous slice of the mineral wealth. Naturally, with free money and nothing to do, Nauru now has one of the highest rates of obesity and the highest rate of diabetes in the world. But what makes Nauru truly exceptional is the series of catastrophic and comically bad investments its government made to ensure its long term financial stability, investments that helped transform it into the perennially broke and indebted nation it is today.

Nauru’s investments resemble what would happen if someone drew up a list of good investments and proceeded to do the exact opposite. In 1994 the Nauruan government bought a vacant brewery in Australia. They sold it, still vacant, in 1998. They lent money to a failing Australian-rules football team who lost their last game 187-36. They bought failing commercial property in Melbourne that, natch, continued to fail. But all of this pales in comparison to Nauru’s decision to invest in the London stage play Leonardo the Musical: A Portrait of Love.

At least Bush didn't use the bailout money to stage a $700 billion musical about Claude Monet.

Stop and consider that. What kind of financial catastrophe would your country have to be in for its leaders to look at a plan for a musical and think “Yeah, that’s gonna fix our nation’s financial problems”? Much less a musical in which Leonardo da Vinci walks up and slaps Mona Lisa’s ass in the first act. That’s not a fucking investment plan, that’s a scheme. A god-awful, Scooby-Doo-villain-would-be-proud scheme. And like any good scheme, the story of Leonardo the Musical also had a shifty character. In this case, it was some guy named Duke Minks, who had been head roadie for a British pop group called Unit 4 + 2 that had topped the UK Charts for one week in 1965. For most governments, a guy named “Duke Minks” boasting a resume like that would probably be escorted out of the building, but the wise leaders of Nauru instead appointed him an adviser to their government. The fruit of that appointment was Leonardo the Musical. It was critically panned and closed 5 weeks later.

So, in the spirit of every celebrity whose extravagant life hilariously hit the skids, where is Nauru now?
Well, they are still sitting in the pacific, and their economic outlook remains dismal. Unemployment is around 90% (!) and the few people that do have a job almost all work for the government. Aside from the failed investments, the government of Nauru had lived large, establishing embassies all over the world and paying for expensive executive visits. There isn’t really any phosphate anymore, and the few successful investments they managed to make in the boom years have been repossessed by creditors and companies like General Electric that made them large loans. For a time, Nauru was unreachable except by boat because the sole plane in their airline company was repossessed. In need of cash, Nauru housed asylum seekers from Middle Eastern war zones on their way to Australia (Visit Nauru: The Detention Center of the Pacific) until 2007. But things are (sort of) looking up now. Their current president, Marcus Stephen, is a champion weight-lifter seven times over, though like his predecessor Ludwig Scotty, he is afflicted with the horrible condition of having two first names. President Stephen also doubles as the current president of the Oceania Weightlifting Federation.  That’s pretty hilarious, but in a country where 90% of the population is fat, it’s probably not the worst that could happen. They could be the first nation to star in a commercial for payday loans.