Dear Editor,
Already the Antillean guilder is a monopoly Mickey Mouse currency, since it must piggy back on, and be tied to the US dollar to hold its value.
Why would anyone in their right mind want to create another Mickey Mouse currency that would have to be tied to and piggy back on the US dollar to hold its value? Should we not call it the Disney Dollar instead of the Dutch Caribbean Guilder?
This is what it would be after all, since we would not be able to spend it in any foreign country not even French St. Maarten. Already all they accept is the euro and the US dollar with only a few exceptions at the French market and some locally-owned businesses.
Why would we want a currency that discourages investment and savings? Why would we want a currency and central bank that would have to eventually be subsidised by the tax payers? Is it because we want to continue to let Curaçao ride us for foreign exchange? Or is it because we want to create high paying useless Central bank jobs for political cronies?
I was in Colombia last week, where 100 US dollars is equivalent to 2,000 pesos. Colombia is a country which has endless natural resources and manufactures all sorts of products, with a population of 45,000,000 people. A currency is not a currency until it can be exchanged freely on the world market.
Ninety per cent of businesses in St. Maarten are conducted in US dollars. The US dollar is the only way to go. Even the current president of the central bank Mr. Tromp recently said so. Official dollarization has gained prominence as several countries have considered and implemented it as official policy.
The major advantage of dollarization is promoting fiscal discipline and thus greater financial stability and lower inflation. The biggest economies to have officially dollarized as of June 2002 are Panama , Ecuador (since 2000), and El Salvador (since 2001).
Government would have to put measures in place to force us to use and spend the Dutch Caribbean dollar. Examples of failed local currency protection policies are Jamaica, Guyana and many other Caribbean Countries. These protection policies only served to scare investment and in the end the flight of the US dollar, hence, that is why they are always short of foreign exchange. Do our politicians still want to keep us hog-tied to Curaçao so they can continue to milk us for foreign exchange taxes?
Peter Gunn
