"Fakkah" a new crisis facing Yemeni traders

Mohammed Abdul Malik - Al Jazeera Net

7 am Every day, Yemeni pilgrim Mohammed Abdullah opens his shop selling foodstuffs in the city of Taiz, south-west of Yemen. His first step is to go to the nearby shops in search of coins and cash from small groups that disappeared from Local market recently.

Mohammad, 56, says he spends most of his time persuading his customers to buy money that has nothing to do with the disappearance of the "fakha" of coins and paper. Most sellers are in constant trouble with dealers every day. .

Innovation of alternatives
In addition to the vendors in the shops, the drivers face a real problem in dealing with the passengers, including university students who are almost able to provide the value of transportation, as explained by the student at the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sana'a Abdul Hakim al-Husami, who said that before taking care of transportation, The driver has a jaw to return the rest of the money.

In the face of this situation, people resort to temporary alternatives, including giving customers gum, chocolates, or any commodity worth the money they have left and are not available to sellers.

This solution may be acceptable to some, but there are those who ask the seller to return money and refuse to take anything because he does not want to abandon what he owns because of the economic crisis, according to a number of citizens with Al Jazeera Net.

Other vendors use shippers because they have coins and small items that the seller needs.

Damaged money
The liquidity crisis is not limited to the disappearance of currencies from small groups, but rather to damaged paper money.

The recent Central Bank of Yemen reports that the damaged money accounts for 90% of the volume of money traded in the market, which makes the government resort to replace it with obedience to new money despite the consequences that may result from it.

Perhaps the most prominent problem that led to the existence of all this amount of damaged funds is the return of the Central Bank of the Houthis in Sana'a billions of riyals of this kind of money to the market, which was a blow to the banking sector in the country.

According to reports of the Central Yemeni, it was receiving between 50 to 70 million riyals of damaged money on a daily basis, and the last execution of money amounted to 18 billion riyals in 2013.

According to sources at the Central Bank of Yemen, Al-Jazeera Net has been preparing to receive a new batch of printed money recently, including one hundred riyals and fifty riyals in the form of coin instead of paper in the first quarter of this year in an attempt to cover the liquidity deficit and provide salaries of government employees .

Fears
Experts in the economy expressed concern that the government will continue to print new currency in addition to what has been printed over the last two years, which exceeded more than 800 billion riyals.

They said in an interview for Al Jazeera Net that this may contribute to further erosion of the value of the Yemeni riyal after declining to 520 riyals per dollar in recent weeks.

The Yemeni economic researcher Abdul Wahid al-Aubli that the "Central Yemeni" to replace the damaged money with new batches do not exceed the quantities of their counterparts in the market, and distributed on a regular basis, so as not to affect the value of the riyal and address the liquidity crisis and avoid inflation.

According to Al-Aubali, Al-Jazira Net, the scarcity of small currencies in the market forces traders to raise some commodity prices to avoid problems with customers.

He says it would have been better for the central bank to replace old and small damaged currencies with new ones gradually and quietly without having to tell people.