Macedonia’s central bank has struggled mightily keeping the currency afloat and pegged at 61 denars to the euro. However, coinciding with drastic increase in food and gasoline prices across the board, the effort to keep the denar stable may come to an end much sooner than expected.
The Central Bank has announced that it’s printing 30 millions of bank notes. It is about 20 million banknotes of 1000 each and 10 million banknotes of 2000 denars each, which have a total value of 40 billion denars or 650 million euros.
Apparently, Macedonia is now not even capable of printing its own money, so the contract to print the bank notes was given to the French sounding British company “De La Rue International Limited”, for which they will collect about 1.5 million euros. The price includes delivery to the treasuries of the NBRM.
Of course, this frantic printing of money has nothing to do with inflation! The NBRM states that the amount of money they print is not due to an already present inflation or putting additional amounts into circulation, rather, it wants to “replace the existing damaged and wrinkled banknotes of 1000 and 2000 denars“, and secondly to have a reserve of banknotes for later when they need to change.
