A foreign exchange certificate, sometimes abbreviated to FEC, is a type of currency. Foreign exchange certificates are sometimes used by governments as a surrogate for a national currency, where the national currency is usually subject to exchange controls or is not convertible. Most examples of foreign exchange certificate have an exchange rate higher than the national currency, being either pegged to a hard currency, or their exchange rate determined by the central bank.
Some countries which have employed FECs in the past include:
- Soviet Union
- China
- Myanmar (until March 2013)
- East Germany (forum checks, pegged to the West German Deutsche Mark)
- Ghana - it was illegal to import and export Ghanaian cedi banknotes (around 1980)
- North Korea
- Cuba (Today's convertible peso, to an extent, is a form of FEC)
- Czechoslovakia (Tuzex)
- Bulgaria (Corecom)
- Poland
Famous quotes containing the words foreign, exchange and/or certificate:
“When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable; only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,
I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer’s had,
But O! my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;
I ran, I ran, from my love’s side because my Heart went mad.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in God’s coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. It is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)