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:
“Genius resembles a bell; in order to ring it must be suspended into pure air, and when a foreign body touches it, its joyful tone is silenced.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“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)