My daughter and her husband had to leave Zaire when the Peace Corps cancelled the program in the country due to unrest which was partly due to the economy, which is in a shambles
Large Foreign Exchange Rates faculty R. Y. Kain <kain@ee.umn.edu> Wed, 6 Jan 93 11:02:32 -0600
During the fall I recall that there was a RISKS contribution in which the writer speculated about the number of digit positions required to specify a real currency exchange rate, concluding that something like four or five digits would surely be adequate. This is incorrect - my daughter was previously in Zaire in the Peace Corps and is now in Congo in the Peace Corps. They (she and her husband had to leave Zaire when the Peace Corps cancelled the program in the country due to unrest which was partly due to the economy, which is in a shambles. When they went in the Peace Corps (Thanksgiving 1990 for Zaire), the exchange rate was something like 400 Zaires per dollar (officially) and about 800 Zaires per dollar in the real market. When they left the country the rate was about 80,000 Zaires per dollar (Sept. 1991), and the official rate had been dropped for some time. This weekend the rate is about 2,500,000 Zaires per dollar!! (And the largest piece of money is a [recently printed] note for 5,000,000 Zaires, but the government has said that in order to control things they were going to remove that one from circulation!)
So in the face of unreasonable people (dictators, etc.), perhaps we need to use a floating point representation for the exchange rates - but I do think that one decimal digit for the exponent should be adequate. (And no one should need seven digit accuracy in the mantissa.)
Richard Y. Kain, EE Department, University of Minnesota kain@ee.umn.edu
