Originally posted by: MaxFlavor
Funny it's still 10:1, weird, maybe the ruble is manipulated by the Russian government? Nah, BRICs will devalue the dollar for sure.
At the time, all the Eastern European satellite countries, as well as Russia, had artificial exchange rates, much, much worse than the Western banks' exchange rates, that tourists had to use when they had to buy local currency. And there were two reasons why tourists had to do that: one, it was almost impossible to use any credit cards (AmEx worked in a few locations in the largest cities), and two, you were compelled to exchange a certain amount of your currency for local currency, at the ludicrously inflated exchange rate. You were basically paying an entry fee. and it amounted to about $100 per person. You had to forfeit all of a given country's currency you had with you when you exited the country. In our trip through Eastern Europe, we used dollars for everything, getting anywhere from 20 to 100 times the official rate, and simply gave away the local currency we had been forced to purchase.
This was in 1979, and of course, in 1989, the whole system collapsed.
The BRICS countries aren't going to impoverish themselves by accepting rubles or flabjibbers (or whatever it is they use in North Korea) for their exports. BRICS will be a nothingburger.
