Visit the Council on Foreign Relations site long enough and sooner or later you'll on see "New CFR Books." Among those listed is Playing Monopoly with the Devil: Dollarization and Domestic Currencies in Developing Countries. I have not read it and probably won't get around to it but based on what the site says the author, Manuel Hinds, argues that developing countries should adopt the dollar for development. Not a terrible prescription actually. Both Hong Kong and Chile began their success stories with currency boards and no lesser an authority than Milton Friedman seemed to support the idea of currency boards in one of his later works, Money Mischief. Nonetheless with the dollar at its lowest point in 14 years against the sterling I can think of a better time for a book such as this be published. The Economist tries to make sense of the dollar's slide blaming a soft economy, the current account deficit, the burgeoning housing bust among other things.
