How did Ecuador and Zimbabwe physically switch their currency to the dollar?

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How does a nation’s hyperinflated currency get switched over officially to USD? Who would want to sell US dollars for zimbabwean dollars to allow that to happen for an entire currency? I can understand it very gradually happening via richer people or emigrants bringing dollars from outside, or tourists, but as a whole how does it logistically happen to completion?

In: Economics

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Well I know in Ecuador what happened was that people just started buying dollars with their sucres. That’s literally it, the people largely replaced their own currency themselves by buying a safer form of money before theirs devalued completely. The govt just said ah well OK since you’re all doing we’ll make it official and so the bank of Ecuador started allowing people to exchange their sucres for dollars. And you’re right, it really was thousands of the local currency for 1 dollar.

How they did this is that the govt makes an agreement with the US, something like “hey were à tropical country with boatloads of chocolate and bananas and other stuff, we’ll give you a bunch of this at really really great prices in exchange for you shipping us a bunch of US dollars for us to put in banks and ATMs so people can exchange them”

So they do this for a while, and simultaneously stop printing their own local currency. And then after a year or so they say “alright that’s its no more exchanges. From now the local currency is worth nothing”. By then the economy should be running on dollars if the central bank of the country is in any way competent

Anonymous 0 Comments

I thought maybe it happens very gradually and then the country would sell assets, export goods to get dollars in return and bring in cash that way? They can’t print it, so all this physical cash is just brought hand in hand physically from the US to Zimbabwe? Maybe I’m looking at it all wrong?