As explained by Katharina Pistor, professor of law at the Columbia Law School in New York, a twenty-first-century state is truly sovereign only to the extent that it has its own sovereign currency. That said, if many countries have their own national currency and therefore enjoy monetary sovereignty in the legal sense, very few can be said to have currency sovereignty from an economic point of view. This is due to the fact that they have not reached financial independence, as evidenced by the fact that they continue to borrow in foreign currency and on the basis of foreign law. In fact, a state that depends on foreign currency-denominated external financing to solve its balance of payments problems is not able to conduct an autonomous economic policy, even if it has its own national currency: the funds it receives are often accompanied by conditionality clauses that limit its autonomy. For example, most African countries that have their own national currency, such as Ghana, Angola or Mozambique, depend on IMF funding and are forced to manage their currency and budget according to the requirements of the Bretton Woods institution. According to Katharina Pistor, only the United States, Britain, Japan, China, Canada, Australia and Switzerland can today be considered truly monetary sovereign countries, in the sense that they have a currency with a flexible exchange rate and generally borrow only in their own currency.

Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa's Last Colonial Curr…, loc. 364