Anna Fifield is a long-time reporter on North Korean matters for the Washington Post. In a book Fifield wrote about the dysfunctional country, she noted that the U.S. dollar is the currency of exchange there.
Where it perhaps gets interesting is just how common this monetary state of affairs is. As I point out in my new book The Money Confusion, a majority of monetary transactions that take place in Venezuela are refereed in dollars. In Argentina, if you want to buy a house you better have dollars. The Argentine peso’s history of endless devaluations render it unfit for exchange, much as 3,000+ devaluations of the Iranian rial since the 1970s have had the impact of sidelining it as money. Where local currencies aren’t trusted, the dollar is routinely king.
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