Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeffrey Sachs

Economists rarely get to sound like stand-up comics, but Jeffrey Sachs lands a deadpan punchline that doubles as a policy warning. "It's not so unusual to run out of someone else's currency" is a compact rebuke to the fantasy that dollars, euros, or any hard foreign currency can function as an unlimited lifeline. The phrasing is deliberately casual - "not so unusual" - because the phenomenon is banal: countries do it all the time. That understatement is the point. Sovereign crises are often treated as exotic morality plays about corruption or laziness; Sachs reframes them as an arithmetic trap.

The intent is to distinguish between constraints that are political and constraints that are mechanical. A government that issues its own currency can always create more of it, for better or worse. A government that borrows in a currency it doesn't control is effectively taking a mortgage in a neighbor's money. When export earnings fall, investors flee, or commodity prices swing, the central bank can't print the missing dollars. Suddenly "solvency" becomes a question of access, not just balance sheets.

The subtext is aimed at both creditors and domestic elites. To creditors: stop pretending repayment risk is a surprise; the structure guarantees periodic crunches. To policymakers: stop building prosperity on foreign-currency debt and hot capital flows. In the background are recurring episodes - Latin America's debt crises, Asia in 1997, Argentina, and euro-periphery states that discovered the euro was "someone else's currency" in everything but name. Sachs is arguing, slyly, that crisis is often designed into the financing model.