Cashed Out

A few days back, we touched on the challenges of undermining one's enemy by counterfeiting his currency. Today we'd like to shift the focus to another tactic of fiscal warfare: issuing a new currency upon seceding from a national union. We all know the Confederacy did it back in the day, but it has become an exceedingly rare step in contemporary times. Take, for example, the Tamil Tigers, who succeeded in briefly creating a de facto government on the Jaffna peninsula, complete with its own...