So, bywarren, you're saying that the IMF and World Bank have been totally hoodwinked by Belize?
I agree that if the Belize dollar were allowed to float its value would decline in terms of the U.S. dollar. And I agree that it has no real exchange value outside Belize. And that, at times, the demand for dollars is such in Belize that you can get more than 2 BZ to 1 US.
But those facts in themselves don't mean that the Belize government is printing funny money. Any more than it means that China is removing yuan from circulation (most economists think the yuan is pegged at an artificially low rate to the U.S. dollar to make Chinese exports more competitive.)
A lot of it has to do with the fact that the entire Belize economy, the whole economy, is only about the size of a small town of 30,000 people in the U.S. (on a GDP-equivalent basis). The Belize economy is so small no one in his/her right mind would use the Belize dollar as a store of value and hence the Belize dollar isn't actively traded on world markets. The vast majority of world currencies are actually like that.
Actually, for the last couple of years the Wall Street Journal's weekly report on the value of the U.S. dollar uses not 2 to 1 but less than that, 1.97 to 1, for the Belize dollar.
But I'm out of my depth here -- any economists out there?
--Lan Sluder
AmbergrisCaye.com 
