exchange their old currency for the newly printed currency,
though this had to be done in one week, rather than forty-
two years, as in the French case. Then came the catch: the
government announced that no one could convert more
than 100,000 won, though it later relaxed this to 500,000.
One hundred thousand won was about $40 at the black
market exchange rate. In one stroke, the government had
wiped out a huge fraction of North Korean citizens’ private
wealth; we do not know exactly how much, but it is probably
greater than that expropriated by the Argentine government
in 2002.
T