>3. Failure to have a currency board, so that when the state had a deficit
>it printed more money.
>
>The last is the currency board debate.
Yes, back to that. I thought of scanning & posting the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money & Finance entry on currency boards, but unfortunately it's written by Alan Walters, a former economic advisor to Thatcher, and Steve Hanke, the Johns Hopkins economist who's probably the world's leading promoter of the concept. So the article is full of sentences like "Again, this criticism has proven largely invalid." But two points from the article make their political aspects clear. First, the opening: "Currency boards were once ubiquitous in the British colonia regimes of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East, where over seventy once appeared." Later, we learn that there was a currency board (designed by J.M. Keynes) in North Russia from late 1918 to late 1919 - during, that is, the period when, as the article euphemistically puts it, "British and other Allied forces became entangled in the Russian civil war. The Allies supported the White (anti-Bolshevik) government of North Russia."
In other words, an imperial and counter-revolutionary heritage. Entirely appropriate that the concept should be revived in the 1990s.
Doug