A growing coalition, Cymru Together, is challenging traditional politics – calling for practical plans that connect climate action with economic justice, writes BETHAN SAYED
Argentina's dollarisation gambit: what does it mean in practice?
President Javier Milei's push for dollarisation is a class attack on workers, exacerbating the economic crisis. These neofascist measures are quickly revealing the failure of neoliberalism rather than socialism, writes PRABHAT PATNAIK
ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT delve into the strange, active – and sometimes predatory – world of plants
While politicians fixate on defence budgets, the real answers lie in peace-building and economic justice, says ALAN SIMPSON
ANDREA BRADLEY highlights how a City of Glasgow College health and safety dispute is the subject of an STUC Congress emergency motion
Labour government must urgently start to implement the policies on which it got elected, or it will face curtains, writes BRIAN LEISHMAN MP
CND and the Stop the War Coalition are calling for a mass protest this Saturday to end British complicity in illegal US strikes at RAF Fairford. SOPHIE BOLT explains
ARGENTINA’S new president Javier Milei proposes to use US dollars as the currency of his country, while abolishing its central bank altogether. What is involved in this proposal is not just maintaining a fixed exchange rate between the dollar and the domestic currency, but an abolition of the domestic currency altogether.
The maintenance of a fixed exchange rate does not preclude the central bank of the country printing more of the domestic currency whenever there is a demand for more domestic currency, while using an array of instruments to ensure that there is no shift to dollars from the domestic currency so that its exchange rate remains fixed; but “dollarisation” means a complete shift to dollars by abolishing both the domestic currency and the central bank that is normally entrusted with the responsibility of printing it.
An example will make the difference clear. Suppose at the given level of the gross domestic product, of prices and the interest rate, the total demand for money happens to be 100 units of domestic currency, while its supply is 90; then the central bank can print 10 units of additional domestic currency with impunity, without any fear of this additional printing upsetting the fixed exchange rate vis-a-vis the dollar; but in the case of a “dollarised” economy where the dollar alone is the currency used, if the demand for dollars at the given level of GDP, of prices and the interest rate, happens to exceed the supply of dollars in the economy, then there is no question of printing any additional dollars since that can only be done by the US central bank and not by the central bank of the country in question, which in any case has been abolished altogether.
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