Is there a country that uses the term “dollar” for currency without also using “cents” as fractional monetary units?
"Going through the list of economies that currently use the dollar, all of them list cents as a fractional unit. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, the 1/100 fractional unit is still called a cent, but it's no longer in circulation in coin form and only finds use in financial markets or electronic payments.  In countries like Malaysia, the word ""sen"" is used as the translation of the word ""cent"", even though the word for the actual currency, ""ringgit"", isn't a translation of the word ""dollar"".  A similar situation occurs in Panama. The local currency is called the balboa, and it's priced on par (1:1) with the US dollar. US banknotes are also accepted as legal tender, and Panamanians sometimes use the terms balboa/dollar interchangeably. The 1/100 subdivision of the balboa is the centésimo, which is merely a translation of cent. Like Malaysia, the fractional unit is called ""cent"" (or a translation) but the main unit isn't merely a translation of the word ""dollar."" On a historical note, the Spanish Dollar was subdivided into 8 reales in order to match the German thaler (the word that forms the basis for the English word ""dollar"")." "Wikipedia has a nice list of currencies that use ""cents"" and currencies that use 1/100th division that is not called ""cent"". Cent means ""100"" in Latin (and French, and probably all the Roman family of languages), so if the currency is divided by 100 subunits - it will likely to be called ""cent"" or something similar in the local language. The list of currencies (on the same page) where it is not the case is significantly shorter, and includes countries with relatively ancient currency units that were invented before the introduction of the decimal system (even though now they are in fact decimal they still kept the old names, like the British ""pence"" or the Russian ""kopek""). The point is that ""Dollar"" and ""cent"" are not directly related, many currencies that are not called ""Dollar"" are using cents as well (Euro, among others). It just means ""1/100th"", and it is safe to assume that most (if not all) of the modern currencies are divided into 1/100th."
Dollars are bits you don't control. The banking system has your bits and they can charge you more bits to move your bits around. At any point, they could freeze your accounts and suddenly you have no bits. It's all designed to make it so you can't function in society without them controlling your bits. Today typically a Business needs to hold accounts in more than one currency. Banks in certain countries are offering what is called a dual currency account. It is essentially 2 accounts with same account number but different currency. So One can have an account number say 123456 and have it in say AUD and USD. So the balance will always show as X AUD and Y USD. If you deposit funds [electronic, check or cash] in USD; your USD balance goes up. Likewise at the time of withdrawal you have to specify what currency you are withdrawing. Interest rates are calculated at different percentage for different currencies.  So in a nutshell it would like operating 2 accounts, with the advantage of remembering only one account number. Designate a particular currency as default currency. So if you don't quote a currency along with the account number, it would be treated as default currency. Otherwise you always quote the account number and currency. Of-course bundled with other services like free Fx Advice etc it makes the entire proposition very attractive. Edit: If you have AUD 100 and USD 100, if you try and withdraw USD 110, it will not be allowed; Unless you also sign up for a auto sweep conversion.  If you deposit a GBP check into the account, by default it would get converted into AUD [assuming AUD is the default currency] AFAIK money is a fiat currency. The penny is only worth what the US government says it it worth. If I choose to have my coin material made into pennies then I face an opportunity cost because I could of used that copper elsewhere. If a penny worth of copper is worth 1.8 cents and I choose to make it into a a coin with a value of 1 cent then my opportunity cost is .8 cents.  The whole point of a fiat currency is to take the actual material value of the money out of the equation. A gold coin back before fiat currencies was worth its weight in gold. This would be like saying that you are going to nominally change the value of your gold coin into a coin worth half of its weight. Its weight(value) is equal to 1 gold coin but its spending power is equal to 1/2 a gold coin.  Do you lose value? Of course not. Do you lose spending power? YES Fiat currency is all about spending power, the value is fictional.   When I make the spending power less than the value the purpose of a fiat currency breaks down. Lots of countries *have* printed themselves away from debt. Not all inflation turns into a death spiral like Zimbabwe (or Weimar Germany) did, for that you need to have a really shitty economy that no-one believes in.  The problem with Japan right now is that they are trying to print their debt away, but as they do so, their currency *appreciates*. Gold medal for the first one who manages to explain that one. "Well there are a couple reasons that people from various countries use specific currencies:  1.  Government courts will recognize the settlement of contracts if they are paid with their local currency.  So even if you wanted to be paid in Swiss Francs, your contracting partner can choose to pay you in USD instead.  This artificially inflates the value of the local currency by increasing demand for it.  2.  You're only allowed to pay your taxes in the local currency.  This also artificially increases the demand for it, and it's the ""root value"" of the currency - people clamor for bits of green paper because if they don't have enough of it to pay off the tax man, they'll go to jail." "The best I could come up with would be to simply ask for the amount of ""notes"" and ""coins"" you would like, and specify denominations thereof.  The different currency labels exist for the reason that not all of them are valued the same, so USD 100 is not the same as EUR 100. To generalize would mean some form of uniformity in the values, that just isn't there." "Keep in mind that not every currency is ""tradeable"", i.e.: convertible.  In fact, neither the Brazilian nor the Thai currencies are fully convertible, and the trading with them may be limited. There are 17 fully convertible currencies currently in the word, you can find the list here." i disagree. if a country has sovereign currency, then there is no squandering.  where does that money come from in the first place?  govt creates it, and spends it into the economy through deficit spending.  And govt gets a service or product in return from that spending. Govt deficit spending = private sector savings. It's called correlation. I found this: http://www.forexrazor.com/en-us/school/tabid/426/ID/437424/currency-pair-correlations it looks a good place to start Similar types of political economies will correlate together, opposite types won't. Also there are geographic correlations (climate, language etc) Another possibly significant issue, is that the number ten thousand is very important in the Japanese language.  In Japanese, you count in ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, BUT instead of a 'hundred thousand', you have ten ten thousands.  and then one hundred ten thousands, and then a thousand ten thousands.   The ten thousand yen note, equivalent roughly to the $100 bill, is the main base of Japanese currency.  If you go to the bank, for example, you will almost always take out your money in ten thousand yen notes.   Knowing a little about the language, i would say it would become quite strange and un-natural to suddenly start using a hundred as the main note value.  I doubt the Japanese people would ever even consider that, and my guess is the only people who are even put out by the large number of zeroes are foreigners who are used to dealing in dollars and cents. "The solution I've come up with is to keep income in CAD, and Accounts Receivable in USD.  Every time I post an invoice it prompts for the exchange rate. I don't know if this is ""correct"" but it seems to be preserving all of the information about the transactions and it makes sense to me.  I'm a programmer, not an accountant though so I'd still appreciate an answer from someone more familiar with this topic." I'm pretty sure using it wastes a lot of man-hours in the economy.  Handling money isn't cheap.  Handling pennies is asinine.  We should probably get rid of nickels and quarters too just to do away with the last decimal place, just dimes and a (smaller than current) half-dollar. A Yen is like a penny.  Buy a chocolate bar 100¥ or £1.00.  Should the UK get rid of pennies and only price things to the pound? I can see that dollars are more useful than Yuan (after all, in my example, Russia may wish to buy from countries other than China).  What proportion of, say, international trade by Japan with countries other than the US is conducted in dollars? Arguably, the only reason the US can print dollar without massive repercussions on devaluing it is because of it is the world's reserve currency, backed by oil. This has allowed to US to build the world's biggest and most powerful army because they can easily borrow money to fund it. Everyone needs oil for their economy, therefore everyone needs dollars...