In February 2021 Sudan abandoned the fiction that its pound was worth what the state said it was worth, and devalued it by roughly five-sixths in a single decree. On 21 February 2021 the Central Bank of Sudan adopted what it called a flexible managed float, moving the official rate from a fixed 55 pounds to the dollar to an indicative rate of about 375 pounds — a devaluation of close to 580 percent that finally aligned the official rate with the parallel-market rate ordinary Sudanese had been paying for years. Annual inflation at the time stood around 304 percent in January and would average roughly 359 percent across 2021, among the highest rates in the world. This was not a textbook hyperinflation of the wheelbarrow-of-cash variety, but it was a severe, grinding monetary failure, and the verdict on the record is the dated devaluation that recognized it.
The mechanism began upstream, in 2011. When South Sudan voted to secede and became independent in July of that year, it took with it the great majority of the oil that had underwritten the Sudanese state. Khartoum lost an estimated three-quarters of its oil production — output fell from around half a million barrels a day toward a trickle — and with it the foreign exchange and fiscal revenue on which the government in Khartoum had come to depend. The fields lay mostly in the south; the pipelines and the debts stayed in the north. A petrostate woke up one morning without its petroleum.
What followed was the familiar arithmetic of a government that will not cut its spending and cannot raise its revenue. With oil money gone and access to international borrowing choked off by sanctions and arrears, the Bashir regime financed its deficits the only way left to it: by printing. The pound shed value steadily through the 2010s, the gap between the official rate and the street rate widened into a chasm, subsidies on bread and fuel devoured the budget, and prices accelerated. By 2018 the bread-price grievances that printing had stoked helped ignite the protests that, in April 2019, toppled Omar al-Bashir after three decades in power.
The February 2021 float was the transitional civilian-led government’s attempt to stop the bleeding and to qualify for debt relief. It was a real, dated monetary act, and it did narrow the official-versus-parallel gap that had distorted the whole economy. But it arrived into a country already in deep distress, and the relief it promised did not hold: in October 2021 a military coup derailed the transition and froze the international support the reform was meant to unlock. The devaluation is the closed chapter this file records. The crisis it sat inside was not closed, and by 2023 had spiralled into open war.
The Lebanese pound did not die of a commodity bust, because Lebanon has almost no commodities to bust. It died of a banking arrangement — an effective sovereign Ponzi scheme, in the World Bank’s own framing — that propped up an artificial dollar peg for more than two decades and then collapsed all at once. Between late 2019 and 2021 the pound lost roughly 98 percent of its value against the US dollar, and in July 2020 Lebanon became the first country in the Middle East and North Africa ever recorded to enter hyperinflation. The verdict on the record is devaluation: the official peg of 1,507.5 pounds to the dollar, set in December 1997, was finally cut to 15,000 on 1 February 2023, while the street had already run far beyond it. There has been no stabilizing reform. As of this writing the crisis remains unresolved, and the people it ruined have not been made whole.
The mechanism was financial, not geological. From 1997 the central bank, the Banque du Liban (BDL) under long-serving governor Riad Salameh, fixed the pound at 1,507.5 to the dollar — a peg that, in a country running chronic trade and fiscal deficits, required a perpetual inflow of dollars to sustain. The system manufactured that inflow. Commercial banks lured dollar deposits, heavily from the Lebanese diaspora, by paying interest rates far above world levels; the banks in turn parked those dollars at BDL for still-higher returns under what Salameh called “financial engineering.” The returns of earlier depositors were paid out of the deposits of later ones. That is the textbook definition of a Ponzi, and when fresh dollar inflows slowed after 2018, the scheme had nothing left to pay with.
The unravelling was sudden and total. Mass protests erupted in October 2019; banks imposed informal capital controls overnight, trapping depositors’ dollars behind their counters. On 9 March 2020 Lebanon defaulted on its sovereign debt for the first time in its history. The pound, no longer defensible, collapsed on the parallel market — and because the official peg was kept alive on paper, Lebanon developed a thicket of contradictory exchange rates: the official 1,507.5, the BDL “Sayrafa” platform rate, the parallel-market rate, and the so-called “lollar,” a dollar trapped in a Lebanese bank account that was worth a fraction of a real dollar in cash. By March 2023 the parallel rate had reached 100,000 pounds to the dollar, and the largest banknote in circulation, the 100,000-livre note once worth about 67 dollars, would buy a single dollar.
What this episode lacked was a fix. The 2023 devaluation of the official rate to 15,000 was an admission, not a cure — it merely narrowed the gap between the fictional peg and reality. The deposits that vanished behind the banks’ doors were never restored; estimates of the losses hidden in the system run from roughly 40 to 76 billion dollars. This is a collapse whose human ledger is still open.
The Sierra Leonean leone was redenominated in 2022 — three zeros struck off, 1,000 old leones exchanged for one new one — making it one of the cleaner entries in this archive: a managed transition, on the record, with a dated decree. On 1 July 2022 the Bank of Sierra Leone introduced the new leone, with the ISO currency code changing from SLL to SLE, after decades in which a diamond- and mineral-rich country had let chronic inflation and a weak fiscal hand turn its currency into one of Africa’s most depreciated. The verdict is redenomination, not stabilization: lopping the zeros made the money easier to carry and count, but it did not by itself address the inflation that had produced the zeros in the first place.
The deeper story is the resource curse in its more familiar form. Sierra Leone sits atop diamonds, iron ore, rutile, bauxite, and gold; mining has long supplied the great majority of its export earnings. Yet that mineral wealth coexisted, for decades, with state weakness, corruption, and — between 1991 and 2002 — a civil war that the diamonds themselves helped finance. The “blood diamonds” that bought rebel arms are the darkest expression of a wealth that flowed to private hands and patronage networks rather than to a functioning treasury. A government that cannot capture its own resource rents, and that leans on the central bank to cover its deficits, gets inflation; and inflation, run long enough, gets zeros.
By the time of the reform the leone was trading at roughly 13,000 to the US dollar, having begun its life in 1964 at two leones to the British pound. The old currency’s largest note, the 10,000-leone bill introduced in 2004, had become the workhorse of daily transactions — a denomination that, the central bank noted, made cash handling costly and risky and strained the country’s ATMs. The redenomination divided everything by a thousand: a 10,000-leone note became a 10-leone note, and the designs were deliberately kept similar to ease the change in a country with high illiteracy.
The reform was real and dated, but it was cosmetic surgery on a persistent ailment. Reserve-money growth accelerated sharply through 2022 and 2023 as the government leaned on central-bank financing, and inflation climbed rather than receded after the zeros came off. A redenomination that does not change the fiscal behavior behind the inflation re-accumulates zeros in time. This entry records the dated act; it does not pretend the act was a cure.
The Iranian rial did not collapse in a single catastrophic spike; it eroded, year after year, until it was worth so little that the parliament legislated to strike four zeros off it and rename the unit the toman. The verdict here is devaluation: an oil-dependent economy, squeezed by international sanctions and chronic high inflation, watched its currency fall from roughly 70 rials to the US dollar in 1979 to around 162,500 on the free market by May 2020 — and on 4 May 2020 the Islamic Consultative Assembly approved a plan to redenominate, making one new toman equal to 10,000 old rials. That redenomination is best understood as a symptom dressed as a reform: a legislative acknowledgment that the rial unit had become too small to be usable, not a measure that halted the decline. The crisis is ongoing.
The mechanism is the classic oil-state version of the resource curse, compounded by geopolitics. Iran’s public finances and foreign-exchange earnings rest heavily on crude exports, which makes the state’s revenue hostage both to the oil price and to whether Iran is permitted to sell at all. When the United States withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018 and reimposed “maximum pressure” sanctions, that second variable turned against Iran sharply: oil-export revenue fell from around 51 billion dollars in 2018 to roughly 5 billion in 2020. A government facing a revenue collapse and cut off from world finance leaned on monetary financing, and inflation, already chronic, settled into a punishing range — roughly 30 percent in 2020 and in the 40s through the years that followed.
The redenomination itself must be described precisely, because its status is easily overstated. The May 2020 parliamentary vote approved removing four zeros and renaming the rial the toman, with a smaller sub-unit, the parseh (one toman = 100 parsehs). But the measure was legislated and phased, not instantly executed: it required the approval of the Guardian Council, and the central bank was to be given up to two years to withdraw the old rial, with rial and toman circulating in parallel during the transition. The “toman” was in any case already the unit Iranians used in everyday speech, informally dividing rial prices by ten. The reform proposed to make official what the street had long done.
What it did not do was anchor the currency. After the 2020 vote the rial kept falling, reaching record lows against the dollar in the years that followed as sanctions persisted and inflation stayed high. A redenomination that strips zeros without changing the fiscal and external pressures behind the inflation does not stabilize a currency; it relabels it. This file records the dated devaluation and the legislated reform; it does not claim the rial was saved.