Afghanistan’s grim test case for central banking in a global wilderness

Afghanistan is about to provide us with a macabre economic experiment. What happens when you take over a country, have no access to your own international reserves, are shunned by the world community and start running out of cash?

As previous central bank governor Ajmal Ahmady told Euromoney recently – and told the world in a series of tweets on August 18 as he fled the country – the Taliban are not going to get their hands on the country’s reserves, as those reserves are not in Afghanistan to be found.