I’m not even at the 101 stage of economics understanding, so forgive me if my question sounds simplistic or naive! I’m just wondering why, with some of the uncertainty and doubts over some currencies (eg, the euro) and money systems (like sterling and the Bank of England), can’t individuals and bus…

This is not a comprehensive answer, but probably the biggest hurdle is the legal tender law in the United States. Even if there were enough support to use, say, the Australian Dollar here at home, no other currencies enjoy the monopoly protection that the USD has. This makes it extremely inconvenien…

In a free market society in which there are competative currencies then what you are talking about would happen immediately if any currency provider got ANYWHERE near the stage that the U.S has gotten to in terms of inflation, however this doesn’t happen for a number of reasons. Legal tender laws…

Foreign currencies are often also influenced by monetary policy You have to own dollars to pay taxes or off to jail you go

Not really much difference between them:

The state forces you to pay taxes ONLY in state-printed currency. You can not pay your taxes with any currency you want. Since taxation is in virtually all transactions, even without legal tender laws, taxation makes it practically impossible to use more than one currency because of cost. Legal ten…

I should have perhaps caveated my question by saying that I’m from the UK! Thanks for the replies so far, everyone. As I understand it, legal tender might have a slightly different meaning to those of you in the US. So far as I know, we are free to use alternative forms of currency (as one of our h…

Any taxes that I would owe, no. HMRC just asks me to use the average exchange rate for the year for any foreign currency income. Even so, exchanging from one currency (yen) to another (GBP) isn’t particularly hard. As I said, at least one business here traded in two currencies, so it’s not a tax pr…

@Charles Anthony I’m doubtful about that. The Romans required taxes to be paid in coins stamped with a special marker, essentially granting them a legal tender status, but other coins still circulated.

Why can't we just use other currencies?

Economics Economics Questions

John_James October 27, 2011, 7:21am 6

This was partly answered here as well:

Why can’t you use gold as money?

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Why can't we just use other currencies?

Why can’t you use gold as money?

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