When the devaluations and defaults become so extreme that the money and credit system breaks down, necessity generally compels governments to go back to some form of hard currency to rebuild people’s faith in the value of money as a storehold of wealth. Quite often, though not always, the government links its money to gold or a hard reserve currency with a promise to allow holders of that new money to convert it to the hard money. Sometimes that hard money is another country’s. For example, over the past decades many weak-currency countries have linked their money to the US dollar or simply
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