damn you Noclue, you stole my commute joke. 
You’re required to exchange money on entrance? If you had already had the required amount, would you still have had to get more?
You got it. That’s how some of our poorer neighbors guarantee an influx of hard currency.
I’m just amazed that anything could be considered “not good enough” for the Pit. It’s a pit, ferchrissakes. Most stuff in here is crap.
Aren’t there people who commute every day from one country to another? Do they have to go through this every day? When I went to Mexico, I never had to change my money (both in the sense of them letting me in without doing so, and in the sense of there not being very many people in there who wouldn’t take dollars).
OK, the word ‘neighbors’ was ill-chosen (except in a ‘global village’ sense). I was really referring to Egypt and Jordan there. Though I’ve been told the practice extends to many african and latin american countries.
I can imagine Mexico doing that. Too many crossings per day.
It’s all very well saying “I never had to get the local funny money - the locals were happy to accept the mighty greenback” but I can guarantee you that if you paid in US$ in those places then you were getting royally ripped off. Sure, people will take US$, but only if it’s in their interest to do so, because they’re charging you over the odds.
Qadgop mentioned:
¿Do balboas and US coins have not only the same size, weight, composition and denominations as US coins, but do they come with the same design as well? I assume that’s what is meant by saying the minting is often carried out by the US, n’est-ce pas? Otherwise, why won’t the Panamanians do the minting themselves?
Jonathan Chance, I haven’t been to Egypt or Israel, but I’ve been to about 20 different countries (mostly Latin America and Europe) and I’ve never heard of such a requirement. I must be missing something, because I’m having a hard time imagining how this in enforced. Are you supposed to obtain the local currency before entering the country? That can be very difficult to impossible.
quasar: Countries outsource minting and printing when it would be cheaper for them to let another country do it for them, instead of setting up an expensive operation on their own shores. It has nothing to do with the qualities of the currency in the place where the stuff will be made.
For example, Oman’s paper money is printed in the UK, and I’m willing to bet that British quid doesn’t have much Arabic on it. 
All three of the middle east countries I visited required it during customs. You had to convert whatever your currency was into XXX amount of the local currency. What you did after that was your own affair.
Really, it just struck me as a means for the government to guarantee some direct reserves of American dollars. God alone knows if they do it for other non-hard currencies.
And bear in mind this was more than 10 years ago. Such policies change with the wind.
I believe the forced exchange Johnathan Chance referred to was prevalent in Eastern Europe before the Soviets crashed. It was a proftable way for the Soviets to get hold of hard western currencies. Westerners could rarely find enough decent products to buy with rubles, but they couldn’t exchange them back to their own currency on the way out. Or maybe they could, but at some ruinous rate.
I can’t find an immediate cite for this, and I’m basing it on reading innumerable cold war spy thrillers, where border crossings are discussed in great detail. I remember this issue was a recurring one in such books.