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:
“We should meet each morning, as from foreign countries, and spending the day together, should depart at night, as into foreign countries.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Let every woman ask herself: “Why am I the slave of man? Why is my brain said not to be the equal of his brain? Why is my work not paid equally with his? Why must my body be controlled by my husband? Why may he take my labor in the household, giving me in exchange what he deems fit? Why may he take my children from me? Will them away while yet unborn?” Let every woman ask.”
—Voltairine Decleyre (1866–1912)
“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)