Finding Dollar

Tyler Cowen's suggestion that for our upcoming macro test, we study "every waking hour" is proving to be actually kind of fun (thus far). One thing it got me doing is looking up stuff I've always meant to look up.

At the top of that list are non-US countries that use the dollar for their local currency. Whenever I get in a dicussion about why the trade deficit doesn't matter (because countries can't spend our money domestically, thus it ends up back here), these exceptions always enter the conversation. Now I finally have memorized which ones they are.

-East Timor
-Ecuador
-Marshall Islands
-Palau
-Federated States of Micronesia
-Northern Mariana Islands
-El Salvador
-Lebanon (Lebanon also has the Lebanonese pound which is used interchangably with the dollar at a rate currently pegged 1500 to one.)

All countries that have an extremely mild (except Ecuador which I count as "very mild") impact on the global economy.