With the rollout of new controls developed by the US Federal Reserve in collaboration with the Central Bank of Iraq to combat currency smuggling, the dollar exchange rate continued to rise in the Iraqi market, pushing up the prices of food and other essential items. The Central Bank of Iraq has asserted that the rise in the dollar-to-dinar exchange rate is a pass
Read MoreAutor: Ranajoy Ray Chaudhuri Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the support of many. I owe a significant debt to Paul Evans for fostering my interest in banking, central banks and monetary policy. Conversations with Jason Seligman at The Ohio State University and Joseph Kaboski at the University of Notre Dame were instrumental in shaping the bo
Read MoreIn Iraqi folklore, Saturday is both an ominous and auspicious day. Iraqis say it is Awwad —“repetitive” — and hence they prefer to postpone taking important decisions to other days of the week. For many Iraqis this week, the news of Dr. Sinan al-Shabibi’s unfortunate passing on Saturday, Jan. 8 could not have come on a worse day. While the loss of one of Iraq’s last firmly inde
Read MoreEconomists who studied the reasons for the low per capita growth of GDP in developing countries that rely on revenues from abundant natural resources, (called ‘resource curse’), found it was actually caused not by high exchange rates, but by wrongly conceived economic policies over a long period of time. We will visit this point again at the end of the paper. Meanwhile, and unt
Read More1. Introduction On May 19, 2020 Alaa al-Deen Ja’far (henceforth A. Ja’far) published an article entitled ‘Choice of zero ‘interest price’ to face the current deflation in Iraq.’ [1] Much of the article’s text comprises extracts from A. Ja'far’s 2011 book, [2] which is not included in the article’s references. The extracts are stated verbatim, with minor cosmetic
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