Are there any modern timelines where a single country has multiple currencies?

[Qaa]

This is kinda niche, but I've been reading some of Jane Jacobs' books and she suggests that second-tier cities in a nation are crowded out economically by having to share a currency with first-tier cities in the same way that an oil boom destroys the other sectors of an emerging economy.
e.g: Detroit is less able to recover from decline than it otherwise would be because it shares a currency with Silicon Valley.

This is a pretty fringe economic theory and has it's detractors but it's interesting to see how this meshes with politics. What if Quebec had it's own currency to appease independence supporters? What if Czechoslovakia stayed as one country but had two currencies? Going in the other direction, what if Deng merged CNH and CNY?
Have any timelines been made that explore these ideas?

 

[garabik]

What if Czechoslovakia stayed as one country but had two currencies?

If anything, the opposite - for a short while there were hopes for a continuing monetary union. But in face of the economic turmoil and the economy of Slovakia tanking faster, it is pretty obvious everyone would blame "the other half" for either dragging them down, or unjustly profiteering on them, depending on which half you happen to be in. Separating the currencies was the least bad pragmatic solution.

Going in the other direction, what if Deng merged CNH and CNY?
Have any timelines been made that explore these ideas?

I suppose you are aware of OTL rump Yugoslavia (renamed to SCG) Serbia and Montenegro (and Kosovo, but that was more compllicated) using separate currencies.

A TL where the current day entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina use two different currencies is rather easy to imagine.

 

[Don Corleone]

Don't know of any officially but I've heard of people using the USD as a medium of exchange in some countries.

You also have Bitcoin.

 

[RousseauX]

Don't know of any officially but I've heard of people using the USD as a medium of exchange in some countries.

yeah it's actually quite common since USD is much more stable than most currencies in the world

like Lebanon today is an example:

Lebanon leans on US dollar to cope as currency, economy tank

The Lebanese pound has lost as much as 98% in value since late 2019, and now most restaurants and many stores are demanding to be paid in dollars to bypass what’s seen as a nearly useless currency.

apnews.com

 

[Arkenfolm]

It is generally not wanted because it undermines the authority of the state. The Liberty Dollar was a libertarian attempt at trying to privately circulate gold and silver coins that got its creator arrested and sent to prison with a federal prosecutor describing it as a "unique act of domestic terrorism." Canada would not want Quebec issuing its own currency.

One problem is that it would be easy for a government/central bank to screw over people living in an area with this currency with the exchange rate. It would kind of be like what France does with the CFA franc, where African nations using it can't control their monetary policy (which works in France's favor), and theoretically the problem is even worse now given that France uses the euro.

That's why this usually happens in economically distressed third world countries. Zimbabwe for instance abandoned their currency where quintillion dollar bills were absolutely worthless and used the South African rand and the US dollar for exchange.

 

[Post]

Scotland has the Scottish Pound, and of course there's also the British Pound.

 

[michael1]

Without a fixed exchange rate between the two currencies it creates huge technical problems: what currency are taxes and benefits paid in, what currency is the minimum wage set at, presumably two different interest rates would apply within the country...

Setting that aside there's another problem: there's nothing intrinsically geographic to money. It would presumably be legal to use either currency in any part of the country (just like it's legal to use euros in the UK: places don't need to accept them but can) and then Gresham's law would apply. What stops the Euro gradually displacing the £ is that government doesn't accept it and there's no reasons for others to make the switch unless their close to a border. In the example you cited there would be predictable exchange rate movements so it's likely to be displaced just like with the adoption of the $ discussed by others above. Making it illegal to use one currency in a particular region would need strong capital controls around that region to stop a black market growing up, and these may well impoverish that part of the country by making it undesirable to invest (or work) in that region due to the difficulty of getting any profits out and the falling relative wages. In some ways money is a veil, the car industry suffered a decline in relative profitability/importance so it needs either fewer workers or to pay them less (or both). Having a Detroit currency would just enable an easier drop in relative wages through devaluation rather than renegotiation. The veil might make adjustment easier but it's unlikely to change the fundamental position or fewer workers or lower living standards. This is especially the case when debt is involved: would Detroit have been able to borrow in Detroit currency which it could chose to devalue or would it have had to borrow in the $ used by the rest of the US, in which case devaluing would make it harder to repay the debt (since revenues would fall without affecting the debt).

With a fixed exchange rate between them then it seems a bit pointless

An example that springs to mind of two currencies in a single country is historic (but not geographic). It used to be the case that high value coins in England and France were made of a certain weight of gold and low value coins of a certain weight of silver. So in England there were Gold guineas and silver shillings whereas in France there were gold Louis d'or and silver ecu. Unfortunately the values didn't line up well so English silver coins tended to be melted down and exchanged for melted down French gold coins. This is how England ended up on the gold standard.

I got a bit carried away, sorry...

 

[Andristan]

I believe that the Serbian part of Bosnia Herzegovina uses the Serbian currency as part of their separatist struggle, as does the Serb parts of Kosovo.

 

[jlckansas]

You have had places like Korea and Vietnam when the wars there were going on with the US troops being payed in script instead of US Dollars because of the use of dollars as an alternate medium of exchange that was messing up the host countries currencies.

US Dollars in Germany, post ww2, were used in a lot of the places around the bases there.

Along the US Canadian border there are Tribal Casinos on the US side that take Canadian money, at the current exchange rate, and will pay out Canadian money to the people there.

US Mexico border towns use US Dollars and return change in US Money in the ones on the Mexico side of the border.

 

[Analytical Engine]

I mean, this exists:

Bristol pound - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

But, this sort of thing mostly happens in countries with very weak currencies, where people accept much more stable currencies - e.g. US dollars, Euros, Swiss francs etc. - or in areas where there's a lot of cross-border traffic, where both the local currency and the currency of the neighbouring country are used.

Also, many communist countries had two parallel currencies - except, one of them could only be spent inside the country, and the other could be used elsewhere.

 

[Navigator]

This sort of thing mostly happens in countries with very weak currencies, where people accept much more stable currencies - e.g. US dollars, Euros, Swiss francs etc. - or in areas where there's a lot of cross-border traffic, where both the local currency and the currency of the neighbouring country are used.

In the 2000s and early 2010s there were a lot of shops and supermarkets in Belgium and the surrounding borderlands of Holland, Luxembourg and Germany which preferred coach parties of British tourists to pay for their alcohol, cigarettes and chocolates in pounds and pence rather than (the then new and disliked) euros and cents.