BIS study traces life and death of currencies since 1850
Currencies are usually created for political reasons, but ‘often die for economic ones’, authors find
Bank for International Settlements researchers on November 6 published a new global dataset spanning the evolution since 1850 of 568 currencies, of which 163 are still in use.
Iñaki Aldasoro, Jon Frost, Rudraksh Kansal and Catherine Schenk find currencies are “often born for political reasons, but they often die for economic ones”. Their median duration is 33 years, though nearly a quarter in the dataset lasted less than a decade.
The study says that over the past 176 years, officially issued
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