The Not-So-Mighty Dollar

I first noticed that something had changed when I visited Damascus in the summer of 2006. Previously, the way to enter Syria without a month-long wait for a visa had involved flying to the capital, having a pre-arranged meeting with a certain man at the airport and giving him an envelope containing $200 in greenbacks. This time, he told me in a hasty cellphone call, this practice would no longer be accepted. “Things are just not so stable any more, so there has been a change,” he told me. “This time you will have to bring €200.” And so it went, over the next three years, in the swathe of cash economies that surround Europe’s perimeter: drivers in Diyarbakır, guards in Chisinau, bootleg cellphone merchants in Tbilisi all began switching their baseline currency of exchange away from the increasingly volatile dollar. The bribe, the grey market deal, the payoff and the wheel greasing had become transactions denominated in the more solid and reliable currency of the European...