Typography

I often hear the idea that the U.S. dollar is the means by which the U.S. implements sanctions. And since the U.S. dollar pervades all corners of the globe, the U.S. government's sanctions are uniquely powerful. For instance, Reuters reports that Russian resource giant Rosneft is shifting all its contracts over to euros in order to "shield its transactions from U.S. sanctions." Another version of this idea was recently floated by David Marcus, the head of the Libra payments project: "The future in five years, if we don’t have a good answer, is basically China re-wiring” a large part of the world “with a digital renminbi running on their controlled blockchain,” Marcus said. He warned about the prospect of “having a whole part of the world completely blocked from U.S. sanctions and protected from U.S. sanctions and having a new digital reserve currency” with no alternative." The shared assumption of both the Rosneft and David Marcus quotes is that the U.S dollar ...

I executed one of the oddest financial transactions of my life earlier this week. I did Norbert's Gambit. These days a big chunk of my income is in U.S. dollars. But since I live in Quebec, my expenses are all in Canadian dollars. To pay my bills, I need to convert this flow of U.S. dollars accumulating in my account to Canadian dollars. Outsiders may not realize how dollarized Canada is. Many of us Canadians maintain U.S. dollar bank accounts or carry around U.S. dollar credit cards. There are special ATMs that dispense greenbacks. Canadian firms will often quote prices in U.S. dollars or keep their accounting books in it. I suppose this is one of the day-to-day quirks of living next to the world's reigning monetary superpower: one must have some degree of fluency with their money. Anyways, the first time I swapped my U.S. dollar income for loonies I did it at my bank. Big mistake. Later, when I reconciled the exchange rate that the bank teller had given me with the actual mar...

 Did Indian PM Narendra Modi get the idea for the recently-executed demonetization by watching old episodes of M*A*S*H, a 1970s hit TV show set in the Korean War? In the clip below, M*A*S*H's Colonel Potter is alerted to an imminent phasing out old "blue" military money with red, the idea behind the switch to punish counterfeiters and black marketers. As the conversion is happening, Colonel Potter is ordered to make sure that the gates to the base are closed so as to prevent illegitimate blue money from being smuggled in for changing. Sounds a bit like Modi's November 8, 2016 sudden phasing out of ₹1000 and ₹500 notes, no? The money switch depicted in the M*A*S*H episode isn't just fiction. During the Vietnam War, mass demonetizations were a fairly common event on military bases. To isolate dollar-using U.S. troops and civilian contractors from the regular Vietnamese monetary system, U.S. military authorities fashioned a parallel scrip-based system in which Milita...

Somalia has long played host to one of the world's strangest monetary phenomenon, a paper currency without a central bank. I explored the idea of Somalia's "orphaned currency" more fully four years ago , but if you're in a rush what follows is the tl;dr version. Despite the fact that both the Central Bank of Somalia and the national government ceased to exist when a civil war broke out in 1991, Somali shilling banknotes continued to be used as money by Somalis. Over the years, Somalis also accepted a steady stream of counterfeits that circulated in concert with the old official currency, a state of affairs that William Luther explores in some detail here . The story is worth revisiting because apparently Somalia's newly restored central bank is on the verge of re-entering the game of printing banknotes after a quarter century absence. With the help of the IMF, the Central Bank of Somalia (CBS) plans to issue new 1000 shilling banknotes, the introduction of hi...

The topic of euro breakup has slowly been trickling back in the news, especially with the potential for Italy leaving the currency union, a so-called Italexit . In this post I want to explore one of the major conundrums that would-be exiteers must face; the problem of banknotes. Almost all euro exit scenarios begin with the departing country announcing a shot-gun redenomination of bank deposits into a new currency, in Italy's case the lira. The effort must be sudden—if redenomination is anticipated ahead of time, depositors will preemptively withdraw funds from the exiting country's banking system, say Italy, and put them in the banking systems of the remaining members, say Germany, doing irreparable damage to Italian banks. After all, why risk holding soon-to-be lira when they are likely to be worth far less than euros? Once the surprise redenomination has been carried out, the next step is to quickly introduce new lira banknotes into the economy. Lira deposits, after all, sh...

"America's only unwanted, unhonoured coin."  - John Willem on the silver trade dollar. The inspiration for this post comes from the old trade dollar , a U.S. silver coin that was minted in the 1870s and 1880s for the sole purpose of circulating in China. Taking the trade dollar as a model, I'm going to discuss the idea of converting the U.S. $100 bill into a trade bill ; i.e. to limit it to foreign and not domestic usage. Why bother modifying the $100 in this way? While not entirely convinced, I do lean towards Ken Rogoff's idea of getting rid of high denomination banknotes like the Canadian $100, the Swiss 1000 franc, and the Europe's €500. These bills are used primarily by criminals and tax evaders; their removal will make these activities more costly. The public's licit demand for a private means of payment  can be met by low denomination notes, as can the necessity for a convenient physical payments medium on the part of the unbanked. But as I wrote ...

Last week I asked whether the Federal Reserve could get rid of the $100 bill. This week let's discuss whether it should get rid of the $100. I don't think so. The U.S. provides the world with a universal backup monetary system. Removing the $100 would reduce the effectiveness of this backup. Earlier this week the New York Times took up the knell for eliminating high value bank notes, echoing Larry Summers' earlier call to kill the $100 in order to reduce crime which in turn was a follow up on this piece from Peter Sands. More specifically, Summers says that "removing existing notes is a step too far. But a moratorium on printing new high denomination notes would make the world a better place." As an aside, I just want to point out that Summers' moratorium is an odd remedy since it doesn't move society any closer to his better place,  a world with less crime. A moratorium simply means that the stock of $100 bills is fixed while their price is free to f...

This 2 euro coin is issued by Monaco, which is not a member of the Eurozone Grexit isn't what people take it to be. The standard narrative is that Greece is approaching a fork in the road. It must either stay in the euro or adopt a new currency. I don't think this is an entirely accurate description of the actual fork that Greeks face. Over the next few months, Greece will either: A) stay a member in good-standing of the institution called the "Eurozone" and continue to legitimately use that institution's currency, the euro, or B) leave the Eurozone while continuing to use the euro 'illegitimately.'* This means either the status quo of de jure (official) euroization or de facto (unofficial) euroization. In both cases, the euro stays. The probability of a new drachma emerging is awfully low. The widespread idea that a sick country can rapidly debut a new currency and, more importantly, have that currency be universally adopted as a unit of account is mag...

Bitcoin was supposed to result in the bitcoinization of the world; instead, I'd argue that the world of bitcoin is being dollarized. A successful medium of exchange will be used by four types of actors: retailers , consumers , financial intermediaries , and speculators . In bitcoin's case, the inherent volatility of the cryptocurrency militates against its adoption by anyone other than speculators, leaving dollars as the default option. Let's start with the first bit of the equation; retailers, or merchants. Entrepreneurs who have been trying to bring bitcoin to the mainstream have discovered that while merchants like the idea of allowing consumers to pay with bitcoin, the merchants themselves refuse to deal in the stuff. Instead, upon receipt of bitcoin, a merchant's bitcoin payments processors—usually an intermediary like Bitpay or Coinbase—will instantly convert bitcoin into U.S. dollars on behalf of the merchant. Retailers choose to dollarize rather than bitcoinize ...

The upcoming Greek election has renewed interest in the idea of Grexit. This option is often presented to the Greek public as desirable given that it would restore an independent monetary policy to the nation. Beware, this is dangerous advice. The euro isn't a glove that you can take on and off, it's a Chinese finger trap; once in, it's tricky to get out. Even if Greece were to formally leave the euro, odds are that it would remain unofficially euroized, leaving it just as bereft of an independent monetary policy as before. The real trade off in a Grexit-or-not scenario is between formal membership in the euro with some say in monetary policy, no matter how small, or informal membership without any say whatsoever. The optimists, say someone like Hans-Werner Sinn , advise the Greeks to leave the euro and adopt a new currency. The value of this new drachma would immediately collapse. As long as prices in Greece are somewhat sticky, Greek goods & services will become incre...

In a recent speech leading up to an end-of-month national election, Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe hinted at the possibility of introducing a gold-backed Zimbabwe dollar. This is from the Mail & Guardian : Then there is the business about the Zim dollar, that one issue that makes every Zimbabwean wake up in a cold sweat, and one that every candidate should really avoid. We cannot use the US dollar forever, he [Mugabe] begins. We will have to look at ways of bringing back our currency, sometime in the future. There are uncomfortable murmurs. Mugabe appears to be thinking out loud. "Should we, should we not?" he asks himself. "What if we back our currency with all our gold? Wouldn't it be strong enough? Maybe not now, of course, but sometime in the future. Maybe we will talk to [Gideon] Gono, the Reserve Bank governor." I'm sure the memories of the hyperinflation are too fresh in the minds of Zimbabweans for them to buy into the folly of letting th...