Currency Resets

"Mr. Chávez said the authorities would remove three zeroes from the denomination of the currency, the bolívar. Then he said the new bolívar, worth 1,000 old bolívars, would be renamed the 'bolívar fuerte,' or strong bolívar." The Times seems to be portraying this as some kind of wacky scheme, but I think it's reasonably common. France sliced some zeros off the franc in 1960 and this had been done in Russia shortly before I arrived there in 1998. It's a perfectly reasonable thing for a country with a big bout of inflation in its past to do as part of setting a new beginning. The issue, of course, is that you also do need to change the actual policies that led to the inflation, or else rejiggering the values won't do anything.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/03/currency-resets/41729/