Mr. Mehrabi has proposed that the Biden administration allow monthly transfers of small amounts of the frozen funds for the sole purpose of auctioning off dollars to private banks. Given the Sept. 11 lawsuit, it may not be possible to free up the funds frozen in New York in time to stave off a crisis. It may be more realistic for funds to be released from the banks in Europe, which hold a smaller but still significant amount of the Afghanistan central bank’s money. Before the Taliban took over, the Afghan central bank inked a contract with a Polish company to print about $8.5 million worth of bank notes. There’s still time to save Afghanistan’s central bank.

Source: New York Times January 15, 2022 02:15 UTC