You'll Love The New Nickname They Have For The Dollar Here

No doubt, Eastern Europe is a part of the world where people are accustomed to being abused by politicians.

After decades of Soviet Rule, the cultures in places like Ukraine, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Belarus, etc. have been inculcated with a strong mistrust of government. All government.

One obvious sign of this is how little confidence people have in their own national currencies.

Here in Ukraine, for example, people who have any level of wealth whatsoever hold hard currency– dollars and euros, rather than the local hryvna.

(Naturally, their relative confidence in dollars and euros is misplaced, though I was pleased to see that gold is starting to penetrate the cultural psyche here.)

They even have a funny nickname for these regional currencies that get inflated and devalued by corrupt central bankers and politicians– rabbits… because they grow and multiply in such huge numbers so quickly.

As two different economics students this weekend told me, ‘we are starting to look at the US dollar in the same way…’ I guess that makes the euro a dodo bird.

Anyhow, Ukraine is definitely a country on the move. It had been nearly two years since my last visit, and some things have improved substantially.

As I’ve often written, there are two paths to prosperity– you can either build wealth by creating value, or you can steal it from others.

Ukraine used to be a country that was almost entirely the latter (theft)… but it is slowly beginning to move towards the former (value creation). It still has a long way to go.

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