In February 1998, after consulting one of the authors of this article, President Suharto and his Economic and Monetary Resilience Council advocated the establishment of a fixed-rate currency board system in which the Indonesian rupiah would be backed by and convertible into U.S. dollars as a...

In January 1999, President Carlos Menem suggested replacing the Argentine peso with the U.S. dollar. President Menem's announcement has sparked a debate throughout Latin America and Eastern Europe about what has been termed "dollarization." That debate prompted U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert...