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 sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“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)