To the extent that scarce hard currency resources must be outlayed to repay debt obligations, such funds are unavailable for urgently needed investment and other stimuli to economic growth.

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Virtually anything essential is scarce unless you have foreign currency, but not even that always does the trick.

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Others made money selling hard-currency life insurance just after the crash, when dollars were scarce and Russians were desperately seeking ways of preserving their roubles from inflation.

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The U.S. dollar looks further than ever from paying a positive real rate of interest, leaving both investors and merchants to price scarce resources in an ever-depreciating, ever-more generously supplied currency.

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