This is the fifth edition of the Wizards of Money, your money and financial management series… with a twist. My name is Smithy and I’m a Wizard Watcher from the Land of Oz.
Introduction to Monetary Weapons
In this fifth edition of Wizards we are going to take a look at financial terrorism conducted by western financial institutions even as they freeze the assets of a different kind of terrorist. In the previous edition of Wizards we discussed the dual role of the military system and the financial system in modern empires, and how both systems facilitate the appropriation of foreign resources – the lifeblood of any empire. Today we will explore how certain currency regimes have come to dominate in this arena, and take over from where various cold-war era military regimes left off.
While the world’s eyes are focused on the so-called “war on terrorism” and various acts of terrorism that come in the physical form, the US dollar and its primary wizards are busy wreaking havoc in other nations. As of late October/early November 2001 Argentina is struggling under the currency regime of mass destruction known as the “Dollar Peg”. This is the same mechanism that helped bring down the financial and economic infrastructure of Mexico in 1994/95, Thailand in 1997 and Indonesia in 1998 to name but a few casualties of this monetary weapon.
During the current “terror watch” some eyes have been checking on the sneaky attempts to pass through the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas). But little noticed is the spreading use of stealth monetary weapon known as “dollarization”, which could have an effect more severe than any such trade agreement. On January 1, El Salvador began the new-year by taking the drastic step of “dollarization” – which means making the US dollar the official currency of their nation. Guatemala took steps to do this in May, but is not there yet. Ecuador has already dollarized, and now Argentina’s government says it would rather dollarize – i.e. throw out its own currency – than devalue it to see itself out of its current debt crisis. Not only is Latin America coming under US monetary rule, but other less powerful nations, for example the newly independent nation of East Timor, are being pressured to dollarize.
As we saw in Wizards Part 1, even within the United States, money (or credit) creation in the US dollar is not democratic, but rather is the domain of private bankers and the Federal Reserve. At the international level dollarization and other monetary weapons take credit creation power completely out of the hands of other nations and place it entirely with private financial sector of the United States. Recall the words of President Garfield shortly before his assassination as we discussed in Wizards Part 4 – “Whoever controls the supply of currency would control the business and activities of all the people”. If you believe this then it would seem that once dollarization is in effect, the highly controversial free trade agreements are hardly needed. Dollarization will do the job of such agreements without all the hassles and public outcries associated with these documents that have to go through a more democratic process, little though it may be. Such is the mystery surrounding money and monetary policy that lengthy trade agreements get more attention than the simple move to formally adopt the currency of, and relinquish all credit creation powers to, the super-power.
Dollarization gets little attention here because it can happen in foreign countries without any approval of the United States government as is required for the international trade agreements, and it is often adopted in countries without the approval or even knowledge of a great many of its own people. Many countries probably feel that they are forced to dollarization because if they do not comply with the ruling monetary regime, speculators will eventually attack their currency anyway. This is a valid point for its seems that most nations in the developing world, other than those cut-off from the international markets, have had their currencies attacked by speculators at some point in the past decade.
In this way speculators do act like a military force, going to war against foreign currencies or monetary systems, and pounding them with their might until they win. Just like the US-backed military forces before them they have more and mightier weapons. In the case of a military action during the cold war US-backed military forces could often physically attack a people until they gave up because the former had the most access to the most powerful weapons. The same is true of currency attacks by Wall Street firms (and their European counterparts). The major firms that instigate the speculative attacks have access to more US dollars (or other hard currency such as the Euro) than the central banks of many countries. Remember that the US Dollar is the linchpin of the international monetary system and forms the “reserve” backing up most foreign currencies. By having easy access to tremendous amounts of the mightiest monetary weapon in the world, these Wall Street firms have, in almost all cases, forced foreign currencies to collapse once they have initiated an attack.
Faced with problems brought about by overwhelming speculative attacks,
as with overwhelming military action, countries increasingly seem to give-up and go the way of “dollarization” to eliminate the threat of currency attacks. This trend has profound implications as to lost sovereignty, and a seemingly irreversible acceleration of the phenomenon labeled as globalization. To understand this relatively new trend it is useful to look back into the history of the international monetary system over the past century to discover how things got to this point.
Relationship Between 20th Century Money and 20th Century Wars
World War II and the events leading up to it saw profound changes to the international monetary system and the mechanisms that countries would use to co-ordinate cross-border trade and financing. The most famous of these changes came in the form of the Bretton Woods agreements (named after the meeting place in the US where the agreements were drafted) which created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. We shall just focus here on the IMF because this has more to do with contemporary monetary attacks than does the World Bank. Much of what follows comes out of an Economics text used by many trainee-Wizards in their studies called “Economics” written by some real important Wizards – David Begg (Professor of Economics, University of London), Stanley Fischer (from the IMF and World Bank), and Rudiger Dombusch (Professor of Economics, MIT), and translated into plain language by me.
To understand what the IMF was really created for lets just take a peak at monetary arrangements before the Great Depression. Up until this time many countries were on the gold standard, whereby their own currency was backed by gold reserves at their central bank (The Central Bank is the creator of base money for any currency.), and paper currency could be converted to gold. Just as in Roman times this system meant that whoever had access to the most gold could do the most investing and acquire extensive ownership in foreign resources, and this was usually perfectly correlated with whoever had the most firepower and willingness to use it. This made Britain both the primary military and financial power in the 19th and early 20th century with a late boost coming from its discovery of gold in South Africa.
One of the main complexities of the international monetary system, which is the mechanism through which all international trade and investing happens, is the determination of the value of one country’s currency against another, known as the exchange rate. For example the value of today’s Australian dollar to the US dollar could be expressed as an exchange rate of almost 2 Australian dollars to 1 US dollar, or 1 Australian dollar is worth 0.5 USD. Before the Asian financial crisis the exchange rate was closer to 1 Australian dollar for 0.7 USD. So we say the Australian dollar has since been devalued relative to the USD – it now buys LESS US dollars. This means that it is now more expensive for Australians to buy US products, and Australian products are cheaper for US consumers. The problem of managing exchange rates has troubled international relations for the past 2 centuries and so far none of the management regimes have worked out very well for the majority of people living outside the United States or Western Europe.
Any country involved in international trade would like their exchange rate relative to the currency of trading partners to remain fairly stable and predictable and not to suffer sudden shocks. For if their money suddenly loses value relative to other money their imports cost more and if it gains value their exports are less competitive. The gold standard provided a way to stabilize exchange rates because every currency was convertible into a single common commodity – gold. Up until the Great Depression and under the gold standard there was allowed a fairly free flow of capital between countries and this is what kept exchange rates stable. However, on the downside, the central bank or the government of a country weren’t easily able to change their own money supply to deal with pressing domestic problems such as unemployment and price inflation, because this supply was already fixed by gold movement. Also, financial panics were more likely to collapse the whole system because everyone would rush to change their money into gold and the whole banking system would start to break down.
For these and other reasons the gold standard for domestic money holders was abandoned by most countries after the Great Depression. But this meant that there was no longer any natural way to ensure stability of the exchange rates between countries. It was recognized from the events leading up to the Great Depression and to World War II that some international agreement was needed to create a more stable international monetary system, and one that was to exist in the absence of a gold standard backing each individual currency. This is what gave birth to the IMF.
In the aftermath of World War II the United States was the dominant economic power because it was basically the child of the pre-war powers who had their economic infrastructure destroyed during the war. With the gold-standard gone it seemed to make sense to the powers-that-be for the world to move on to a US Dollar standard, where the value of every currency would be set against the value of the US dollar. In turn the US dollar was fixed against the value of real goods by settings its value against gold as US $35 for an ounce of gold. This was called the Adjustable Peg system and the IMF was created to administer this system and put out fires as needed.
Under the Adjustable Peg system then, many countries might hold US dollars, US government bonds and gold to back their own national currency and keep their exchange rate fixed against the US dollar. Central banks could redeem their US dollars for gold at the fixed price, and this gold was stored at the famous Fort Knox. Exchange rates would be stable as long as demand for US dollars remained fairly stable relative to demand for other currencies. Relative demand for any country’s currency versus others depends on relative flows of imports versus exports and desire for investment domestically versus abroad. To keep things fairly stable, under the original Bretton Woods agreement, there were restrictions on cross-border capital flows or investments to help reduce sudden jumps in supply or demand for a currency that come with speculative capital flows.
The capital controls were necessary otherwise speculators could have had a field day by betting that a certain currency would go down by selling it off against the US dollar and thereby forcing it to go down purely from their speculative activity. Large financial firms with access to lots of US dollars could therefore force a foreign currency of a weaker country to collapse as they desired. The earlier restriction on capital flows is a key point so please remember it because this is a fundamental difference between the original Bretton Woods system and the commonly named post-Vietnam “non-system” that allowed the sudden attacks on, and collapse of, Mexican, Asian and Latin American currencies over the past decade. If a currency collapses people of the effected country become a lot poorer very quickly and things are much worse if the country has lots of debt denominated in, say USD. We have seen that when this happens economic policies then introduced normally lead to increased poverty and unemployment, or employment at below poverty wages, as well as a selling off of natural resources to the west at fire-sale prices. It is interesting to note that the two things that brought down the stabilizing mechanisms of the original Bretton Woods system were America’s extensive cold-war military adventures and the world’s lust for oil (through the 1970s oil shocks).
Under the original Bretton Woods system with capital flow controls, the only thing that could change the relative demand for a currency against the US dollar peg, was a serious trade imbalance. That means a large imbalance between a country’s imports and exports. For example, if a non-US country’s imports from the US exceeded its exports to the US by a lot then its demand for US dollars exceeded the US demand for its currency. To make things balance it could either devalue its currency or get US dollars somehow, say by selling gold or borrowing US dollars. If a large temporary trade deficit came about the IMF could lend US dollars to the country to stabilize its currency value while the deficit existed. But if it was permanent the IMF would recommend a currency devaluation.
For informational purposes I should just say that this issue of management of trade deficits and barriers to trade, and associated demand for currency, provides the link between the IMF and the original GATT or General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which later metamorphosed into the World Trade Organization or WTO. It is interesting that both agreements and institutions jointly deviated drastically from their original post-WWII mission in the late 20th century after the collapse of the original Bretton Woods system.
Under this original Bretton Woods system countries had some control over their own domestic monetary policy so long as it didn’t effect their balance of payments too much, and under capital controls they were protected from excessive speculation. But then America’s increasing military activity throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa in the 1960’s and 1970’s followed closely by the OPEC oil price shocks radically altered the fundamentals of the monetary system throughout the rest of the 20th century. This culminated in severe currency attacks on many of the nations already wounded by the military apparatus several decades earlier. In fact it is almost as if the earlier military efforts laid the groundwork for the later monetary attacks.
The “Oil-Standard” Kicks Out the Gold-Link of Money
To understand this point about the monetary attacks let us first understand how the original Bretton Woods system collapsed. Throughout the 1960s the United States was spending massive amounts of money (US dollars) abroad to fund various military operations that, while under the guise of the “war against communism”, was ultimately buying insurance on investments and economic interests abroad. While certain capital controls existed to prevent speculative pressure on currencies US investors still had many economic interests throughout these regions. A rise in democracy may have nationalized natural resources, created land reforms and otherwise collapsed the value of US investments. In turn this would have had serious ramifications on the US stock exchanges and reverberated throughout the whole financial system. This big military spending abroad on Vietnam and other adventures caused America to have a big and rather permanent trade deficit and greatly increased the supply of US dollars abroad relative to US gold reserves at home. President Nixon was forced to break the peg of the US dollar to the fixed price for gold in 1971 and then the US dollar kept decreasing in value with respect to gold as the US increased its military activities abroad. This caused a huge disturbance in the international monetary system and soon the whole adjustable peg system had broken down. The IMF should have disbanded at this time because its founding mission didn’t exist anymore now that the Adjustable Peg had broken down. .
Then OPEC came along and presented the world with its oil price shocks and a lot of large nations started running significant trade deficits with the Middle-East because the price of oil was now so high. This might have been oil’s way of saying that now that the gold standard was completely dead it would take over as the real good against which currency value should be assessed, which was appropriate since much of the human fighting stopped being about gold and became about oil. The oil shocks and America’s military spending seem to have created pressure to break down the system of earlier capital flow controls so that the Western countries could balance their currency outflow from trade deficits with some inflow of capital from the OPEC countries who were making the big oil profits.
So much money then rushed in to the West as so-called petro-dollars that many financial institutions then turned around, in the absence of capital controls and the gold peg, and lent the money as US dollar denominated debt to many Latin American countries to earn some higher returns. Interestingly a lot of this debt incurred in Latin America was being used to fund the purchase of military equipment by the US favored regimes to assist in the “war on communism”. But the expansion of the US money supply and the oil-shocks led to such bad inflation problems that by the end of the 1970’s the US Federal Reserve decided to reign them in by spiking up interest rates, which is the same as shrinking the US dollar money supply. Many Latin American borrowers were on variable interest rates and this spike in interest rates forced them to be about to default on their US dollar loans.
This threat of default marked the rebirth of the IMF, who had lost its founding mission upon the collapse of the Bretton Woods system during the Vietnam War, into a wholly new entity governing today’s monster of an international monetary non-system. To prevent financial panic spreading to the West upon such defaults the IMF stepped in as lender of last resort to protect the Western creditors from getting hit by defaults. By giving such a blessing to the reckless behavior of international banks the IMF introduced serious distortions favorable to these banks in the form of “moral hazard” that is still with us today. Moral hazard comes about when large investors are enticed into excessive speculation by the knowledge they will get bailed-out if their bets go bad.
Under today’s international monetary non-system we have free flow of capital and persistent speculative attacks against economically weaker countries. To make matters worse these countries have large amounts of US dollar denominated debt, much of which originated as the petro-dollars, and the IMF has made itself understood to be there to back up the big Western banks who get in trouble while speculating on these countries. This Moral Hazard combined with the loss of the original capital flow controls has created a very bad situation for the majority of people in the developing world.
So, how did a reasonably stable post-WWII international currency regime get so nasty? The simple social answer is that too few people now have control over it and they are the ones who benefit from the stupidity of the system as a whole. The more detailed technical answer can be understood by looking at the anatomy of a currency attack conducted by Wall Street, and then looking at what is known as the Unholy Trinity Dilemma.
The Anatomy of a Currency Attack
Recall that under the pre-depression era gold standard, exchange rates were automatically fixed, and there were pretty free investment capital flows. But countries couldn’t do very much about their own money supply to help with domestic policy, unless they went out and dug up more gold. Then under the post WWII real Bretton Woods system there were fixed exchange rates, and countries had some ability to control their money supply for domestic policy purposes such as unemployment and inflation. This was possible because there were controls on investment capital flows.
But now after the collapse of the real Bretton Woods system there are few capital flow controls and many of the smaller economies have tried to peg their exchange rate to the US dollar. Smaller economies try and fix their currency relative to the US dollar because for most countries the US is a major trading partner and because they want to attract funds from US investors so they want their currency to appear stable relative to the USD. However, Wall Street attacks have made this a recipe for disaster and regularly smashed smaller economies. Let’s see how this happens.
Let’s suppose I am the Central Banker of a country called Ozlet and I peg my currency, called Ozlettas to the US dollar so that 1 Ozletta = 1 US Dollar. I create and extinguish money in exactly the same way as the US Federal Reserve does, and as we spoke abut in Wizards Part 1. That is, if I want to issue more Ozlettas in to the banking system I go into the open market and buy US dollars or US government securities. The seller of the dollars or securities gets Ozlettas in return and new Ozlettas enter the banking system of Ozlet. Then the banks of Ozlet create another, say, ten times this amount as bank money denominated in Ozletta just like we spoke about with the US Banks and US dollars in Wizards Part 1.
Meanwhile, with free capital flow some US investors are starting to buy up stocks and bonds in my country of Ozlet which brings some more US dollars into the country. Also the government of Ozlet and some banks and traders might be borrowing some US dollars because of the lower interest rates on them and to facilitate their own international dealings. Over time the borrowings of US dollars from US banks gets quite large. Its gets especially large as the western investors and the World Bank are encouraging my country to borrow more money for infrastructure development so we can catch up with the West.
Then one day a 25 year old bright-spark called Jimmy, who just got an MBA at Harvard and now works with a big Wall Street firm called Betters, Inc., heard a rumor about some indigenous people in Ozlet, known as the Ozletistas, who were starting to demand land rights and better working conditions. Jimmy goes to his boss and says that something bad is about to happen to profit potential in Ozlet. He says”I think we should start selling our investments there”. In fact, lets not just sell our Ozlet stocks, lets also sell short on the Ozletta’s to bet that the Ozletta is going to drop in value against the US dollar. Selling a currency short means that Betters, Inc. will enter into agreements to sell the currency at the today’s price at some point in the future – the price is 1 dollar for 1 Ozletta. They can’t lose. If the Ozletta doesn’t get devalued they lose nothing. If it does get devalued to say 1 Ozletta for 0.5 dollars, then at the agreed date in the future they can buy an Ozletta for 0.5 dollars and sell them for 1 US dollar according to the original “short-selling” or forward contract.
Jimmy’s boss, who barely remembers who or what Ozlet is, says “that’s a fabulous idea” after finding out how much money they could make by being the first to start the attack. So Betters, Inc sheds its Ozlet stocks and enters into contracts going short on the Ozletta. Other investors see what’s going on and say “Oh – I better get out of Ozlet before I lose my money”. Once the attack has started the only two things that can happen are that eiether the currency stays the same or it will lose value. So it’s safer for the investors to start pulling out and extra profitable for them to also take short positions on the Ozletta. As the Ozlet Central Banker I want to prop up the value of the currency and give investor’s confidence that the dollar peg can be maintained, so I might actually be on the other side of many of the shorting contracts. All of a sudden demand for the Ozletta has dropped drastically versus the US dollars. As central banker the only way I can maintain the value of the Ozletta is to keep demand up by buying Ozlettas in the open market with my US dollar currency or bond reserves.
If the attack continues for long enough I know my US Dollar reserves will run out. While I am buying up Ozlettas to keep their value I am taking them out of the money supply. The Ozlet money supply is shrinking, interest rates are going up, investment is decreasing and unemployment has shot through the roof. Riots are breaking out in the streets but I can’t do anything about it because I have to use all my reserves to keep the value of the Ozletta equal to the US dollar, especially because our government has all this debt denominated in US dollars. But the attacks keep coming. Soon my reserves are almost depleted, the Ozletta money supply is shrunk and interest rates are sky high. This interest rate differential and the 1:1 ozletta:dollar peg is encouraging a new type of bet against my country’s currency that is further draining my reserves. I can’t keep the peg. I have to devalue my currency by half so that I can justify a reasonable Ozletta money supply with my much depleted reserves. Wall Street wins! Jimmy, the original instigator of the attack was going on pure speculation about my country that may or may not have materialized. He will get rewarded for his attack with a promotion, and this will encourage him to look for more attack opportunities.
In any case if Jimmy’s information about the Ozletistas was correct all it is saying is that if my country of Ozletta shows signs of real democracy and some redistribution of wealth, well, my currency will be brought to its knees. This is exactly why the Zapatista uprising of 1994 culminated in the Mexican peso crisis. Sounds similar to the military attacks of the cold war, called the “war on communism”, doesn’t it? When this happens I am left with a devalued currency, more expensive imports, inflation, high interest rates, and probably unemployment and a discontented public. But even worse Ozlet now has a huge US dollar denominated debt that has essentially doubled in size with respect to my country’s economy. Either the Ozlet government will default on its debt or, as has happened under the IMF throughout the past two decades, the IMF will come and help Ozlet “restructure things” so we will be able to pay off the debt. Usually this means cutting spending on social goods to direct more funds to the debt that has doubled in size relative to our own currency. It also means making my country more export oriented and attractive to foreign investors to attract the US dollars to pay off the debt. Often this results in sales of labor and natural resources at fire-sale prices.
The Unholy Trinity
In all of the above examples – under the gold standard, the original Bretton Woods systems and the example of Ozlet under today’s non-system it was clear that the following three things could not simultaneously exist for any currency regime:
- Free Investment Capital Flow Between Countries
- A fixed exchange rate or peg to the US dollar
- Autonomous control over domestic monetary policy/credit creation
That these three cannot exist simultaneously is known as the Unholy Trinity Theorem and it is widely documented throughout the mainstream economic literature and I will post some references on the Wizards of Money web site www.wizardsofmoney.org.
The Unholy Trinity is not such a big problem for the developed world because under free capital flow they just let their currency exchange rates float and they don’t wobble around too much because they are the major industrialized nations. Where the Unholy Trinity has profound implications is in the developing world where these smaller economies have tried to fix their currencies to the US dollar to prevent excessive volatility that would come from constant speculation. This has meant that the Central Banks of these countries can only use monetary policy to manage the exchange rate and therefore it can’t be used to deal with pressing internal issues. When these internal issues start to arouse suspicions of speculators the currency gets attacked with tremendous force from Wall Street and the resulting devaluation will be sudden and drastic and so will the IMF austerity measures that follow.
The sad facts are that the speculators may have known nothing about the country in the first place and/or may just be reacting to some emergence of democracy in the developing nation. Furthermore Wall Street has ultimate control over credit creation in the reserve currency that these countries use to back their own national currency, and so it is always guaranteed to win once an attack is started.
Argentina is now faced with such a crisis with its decade old dollar peg of 1 Argentine Peso to 1 US dollar, and over 100 billion of debt denominated in hard western currency. In order to maintain the dollar peg the money supply has shrunk and interest rates are close to 30%. Unemployment and poverty have risen, government spending has been shaved and the Argentine people are not pleased. In a classic demonstration of the complete ignorance about foreign nations that Wall Street speculators so happily attack based on their “wisdom” about them, the Wall Street Journal ran a rather offensive article about the Argentine peso crisis in its October 26th edition. Typical of American ignorance about Argentina’s history the article by Michael Sesit in “The Global Player” section, could do little more than compare the current crisis with the famous musical about the Peron dictatorship. It is quite frightening that the Wall Street crowd with similar ignorance about foreign issues is the same crowd that gets to instigate the speculative attacks that collapse currencies.
Even though widely acknowledged as a problem in mainstream economic circles the IMF refuses to address the reality of the Unholy Trinity. Presumably this is because, while they may admit it exists, it’s actually been very profitable for Wall Street.
Wall Street’s Stealth Fighter – Dollarization
Faced with the harsh reality of the Unholy Trinity, large outstanding US dollar denominated debt and the subsequent need for US capital flow, coupled with exhaustion from Wall Street speculative attacks, many countries’ governments are just giving up and letting Wall Street have it their way. They are abandoning all hope of maintaining their own national currency and passing all monetary decisions over to the United States. They are, as the IMF is increasingly recommending, agreeing to “dollarization”. That is – throwing out their sovereign currency and officially adopting the US dollar as their currency.
This solves the problem of fixed exchange rates and stops forever the Wall Street speculative attacks causing devaluation, but it does so at tremendous cost to these countries. No longer do they have any credit creation or monetary policy powers, or even the ability to act as lender-of-last resort to their own banking system. They cannot use capital controls to protect themselves from volatile capital flows because now all their money is “made in the USA”. Rise in demand for labor and environmental protections would be instantly met with a sucking out of the medium of exchange like a vacuum cleaner, leaving only the debt behind. The control of the medium of exchange that drives their future economic life belongs in the hands of the US banking system and the Federal Reserve. Furthermore US banks may come to dominate their banking system and thereby increase their influence on national governments. This is certainly not helped by the fact that as well as being in control of US Monetary policy the Federal Reserve also plays the somewhat conflicting role of umbrella financial regulator under the Gramm-Leach-Blily Act.
It’s a one way street and it seems headed for disaster. At this point it looks like Argentina will either follow this path or devalue its own currency and default on its debt, or it will get bailed out by the IMF who will then impose worse austerity programs.
On January 1, this year El Salvador took the path to dollarization. Only time will tell how this will work, but the immediate effect was utter chaos according to an article on CorpWatch’s InterPress Service on Januray 5. With a great deal of poverty and a high illiteracy rate, the people of El Salvador hardly knew what was happening to them as the old currency could no longer be used and they didn’t know how to change into the new one. I guess that just shows how democratic the decision was to dollarize.
While the IMF and Wall Street will push for Dollarization as a way to deal with the Unholy Trinity dilemma that benefit them, others must realize that there are other solutions that are better for the majority of the people. One obvious solution is to use capital flow controls to ward off speculative attacks from Wall Street, and this has been used successfully by Chile and Maylasia recently. Also possible is the development of monetary unions for groups of Asian and Latin American countries, similar to the European Monetary Union, but this requires a Herculean effort in terms of diplomacy and putting the long terms interests of these countries against the short term gains possible for its leaders.
There is also the possibility of people and communities and activists and NGOs creating the ultimate money resistance by setting up their very own currency regimes. We shall discuss this further in the next edition of Wizards.
That’s all for Wizards of Money Part 5. Please note that the Wizards of Money has a Web site at www.wizardsofmoney.org where you can get the text of Wizards episodes and find more references.
