From Antiwar.com comes a link to this fascinating story from the Asia Times: “Although many countries do not trade the Iraqi currency, Western traders have been doing so through websites. When trading began last October, a dollar bought 420. Now it buys 555 — a 32% drop. The currency has declined 11% against the dollar in the past five weeks alone, and this while the dollar itself has fallen. In downtown Baghdad, though, the exchange rate is 1,400 to the dollar.”
Also fascinating is this story about sad-sack Coaltion Provisional Authority employees wondering whether they have done any good for the country. The story closes with this: “living in the Iraqi capital has been a life in lockdown. Blast walls hem in the green zone. The rest of Iraq is an off-limits ‘red zone.’ The people running Iraq were blocked from seeing the very country they tried to govern.” Or maybe they weren’t running anything at all!
