Counselor Mazhar Saleh: The statements that attacked our clarification on currency zeros... are politicized and unprofessional

2021/06/23 16:02

Baghdad - Iraq today:

Dr. Mazhar Salih, Economic Adviser to Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kazemi, said on Wednesday, June 23, 2021 that his statement about the project to delete zeros represents a purely economic point of view that included a technical explanation of the issue of the history of the multiplication of zeros in the Iraqi currency during last siege.

In response to statements criticizing his point of view, Saleh considered that they are issued by politicized parties and trolling for words, adding: I have spent seventy-three years of my life and I still face this type of human being, considering that people are enemies of what they are truly ignorant of.

Saleh considered that these statements, which claimed that talking about the deletion of zeros, caused a recession in the Iraqi market, politicized and issued by people who call themselves politicians and independents.

And the appearance of Muhammad Salih set two conditions for deleting 3 zeros from the currency, while stressing that the option to delete is proposed as part of the strategies to reform the currency and cash payments system in Iraq.

Salih said that "the Central Bank of Iraq developed a project to delete three zeros from the Iraqi currency in order to reform the cash payments system, which has become burdened with the insomnia of the economic blockade imposed in the nineties of the last century, and put it into research and study a long time ago, after reviewing about 54 international experiences since The end of World War II until the second decade of the twenty-first century, which took place in various countries of the world, in which the monetary payment systems were reformed and made to work with better efficiency, the last of which was the Islamic Republic of Iran and before that, Turkey.

He added that "the phenomenon of increasing zeros in the monetary unit or adding zeros to a single monetary unit usually comes due to the exposure of economies to unruly waves of inflation or continuous sharp rises for years in the price level due to wars, sieges and conflicts, which lead to financing the deficit of government budgets through cash issuance." .

Saleh believed that "the hyperinflation that hit the Iraqi economy in the nineties of the last century added three numbers to the Iraqi monetary unit (that is, one dinar became equal to a thousand dinars, and ten dinars became ten thousand dinars, and so on for the rest of the categories), while the small categories disappeared from circulation completely, but rather Every 250 fils became equal to 250 dinars, and it was considered the smallest monetary unit in circulation today, which raised the cost of micro-transactions that mostly affect the poor.

He concluded by saying, "The project to delete zeros in Iraq is still technically prepared by the Central Bank of Iraq, which is the official sectoral authority and the monetary authority concerned with this matter and in cooperation with all three state agencies and authorities, but the project is postponed at the present time until the appropriate conditions are achieved and remains part of the currency system reform strategies. and cash payments in Iraq


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