Iraq to Remove the Three Zeros from the IQD
The decision is issued. A minister said it on Iraqi TV. The new notes may already be in Baghdad, like Germany in 1948. The rate's paperwork moves next week.
Saturday night in Baghdad, Iraq's Minister of Communications, Mustafa Sanad, went on the iNews channel and told the country that the decision has been issued. The currency is changing, and the zeros are coming off. By Sunday morning the clip was running on Al Arabiya's Iraq desk and through every dinar channel on the planet. After 23 years of studies, proposals and denials, a sitting minister of the current government said it as a done thing, in the past tense. Not a study. Not a proposal. Issued.
Understand what that means inside a government like Iraq's. Iraqi ministers do not freelance monetary policy on live television and keep their jobs. A statement like that only survives if the thing behind it is real, and nobody in Baghdad has walked it back. The economists on Iraqi airwaves spent Sunday arguing about how and when to do it, not about whether it exists. The formal announcement, when it comes, belongs to the Central Bank, and that is the piece we wait for, as we always do. But the political side of the house just told you where this is going. Every insider channel we track spent the weekend saying the same thing from a different direction. We have not seen this story converge from this many directions at once. Things are underway.