The crisis involved the collapse of Iceland’s banks and currency. The banks are slowly being rebuilt, but the crown has effectively ceased trading, creating headaches for importers.
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Whether the currency is stabilised quickly or not, a bleak winter looms. Annual consumer price inflation exceeds 17 percent and is at its highest since 1990. Unemployment is set [...]

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Seventy-five years ago this month, California’s Standard Oil Company closed a deal with the finance minister of Saudi Arabia, a country the United States had only officially recognized two years earlier. The agreement granted the oil firm an exploration contract and initiated a multifaceted and sometimes thorny bilateral economic relationship. Today, oil still dominates U.S.-Saudi [...]

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Now, however, people in international financial circles detect a subtle shifting of the ground in confidence about the dollar. A few years ago, the suggestion that another currency could rival the dollar would have been ridiculed. Today, some economists say the dollar could begin surrendering some of the advantages of dominance to the euro [...]

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China enters the picture through Macau. Prior to 2000, Macau was under Portugal’s colonial administration. In 1994, Portuguese police arrested several North Korean trading company executives, who carried diplomatic passports, for depositing $250,000 in counterfeit notes in a Macau bank.[3] Otherwise, counterfeit currency laundering there was not pronounced. This began to change sometime after control [...]

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