Central Bank of Iraq

The Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) (البنك المركزي العراقي; بانکی ناوەندی عێراق) is the central bank of Iraq. It was established in 1947, the same year in which the British occupation of Iraq was ended. CBI's primary objectives are to ensure domestic price stability and foster a stable competitive market based financial system. After World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Iraq's monetary system was administered by the British Mandate of Mesopotamia until 1931, when the Iraq Currency Board was established in London to issue the new Iraqi dinar and maintain its reserves. The Iraq Currency Board pursued a "conservative monetary policy, maintaining very high reserves behind the dinar", which was "further strengthened by its link to the British pound". In 1949, the currency board was replaced by the National Bank of Iraq, which had been founded two years before on 16 November 1947. The National Bank of Iraq became the Central Bank of Iraq in 1956. Since switching over to its own central bank, the Iraqi monetary system was "replete with mismanagement, coercive stop-gap measures, and the production of an unstable, unreliable currency which ha[d] not been tradable on the international market for [many] years". Saddam Hussein wielded monetary and the dinar as "a powerful instrument of repression". Beginning on 18 March 2003 (the day before United States forces entered Baghdad as part of the 2003 invasion of Iraq), nearly US$1 billion was stolen from the Central Bank of Iraq. That month, a handwritten note signed by Saddam Hussein surfaced, ordering$920 million to be withdrawn and given to his son Qusay Hussein. Bank officials state that Qusay and another unidentified man oversaw the cash, boxes of $100 bills secured with stamped seals known as security money, being loaded into trucks and trailers during a five-hour operation. This was considered the largest bank heist in history until 2011. Qusay Hussein was later killed by the U.S. 101st Airborne Division in a battle. U.S.