Foreign Policy Blogs

Update on "acmetal"

So while many news outlets, including yours truly, made fun of Nazarbayev’s plan for a world currency, a Nobel-prize winner Professor Robert Mundell thinks it’s quite plausible. He was the architect of the euro and believes the idea could be expanded. I continue to seriously doubt it, Nobel prize or not.

I see Nazarbayev’s remarks as intended for domestic consumption. Blaming the dollar and the West for the economic crisis, and anything else, is standard fare. Nazarbayev is looking to deflect blame. Russia, on the other hand, thinks acmetal is a bad idea as it promotes its own plans for regional use of the rouble. I also doubt the plausibility of that as the rouble is too ostensible a sign of Russian domination.

 

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Elina Galperin

Elina Galperin was born in Minsk, Belarus and grew up in Brooklyn, NY. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School in 2004, she attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she majored in History and Russian Studies. After finishing her senior thesis on the politics of education among the Kazakhs in the late Imperial period, she graduated in February 2008. In September 2010, she received a Masters of Arts Degree in History, having passed qualifying exams on the Russian and Ottoman empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Fall 2011, she advanced to doctoral candidacy, having passed exams in four fields: Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Soviet Union, Mongol Empire, focusing on administrative practices and empire-building.

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