Comment by mapt

I have an alternate theory:

If you end up owing a foreign entity vast war debts, war debts that destroy your economy by demanding that every economic transaction in the sovereign currency be heavily taxed and ship its value abroad? You can limit the damage by just not doing that. Don't call it a transaction, don't use the sovereign currency. Call it a barter, and make up barter tokens, and you're in the free and clear. For a certain value of %taxrate, you're producing such an unambiguously beneficial increase in production and reduction in deadweight losses, escaping the austerity trap, that tax collection actually goes up in the long run as you shift off of the barter tokens and back to the pool of sovereign currency backing them.