Special drawing rights (SDRs) are supplementary foreign exchange reserve assets defined and maintained by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Not a currency, SDRs instead represent a claim to currency held by IMF member countries for which they may be exchanged. As they can only be exchanged for euros, Japanese yen, pounds sterling, or US dollars, SDRs may actually represent a potential claim on IMF member countries' nongold foreign exchange reserve assets, which are usually held in those currencies. While they may appear to have a far more important part to play, or, perhaps, an important future role, being the unit of account for the IMF has long been the main function of the SDR.
Created in 1969 to supplement a shortfall of preferred foreign exchange reserve assets, namely gold and the US dollar, the value of a SDR is defined by a weighted currency basket of four major currencies: the US dollar, the euro, the British pound, and the Japanese yen. SDRs are denoted with the ISO 4217 currency code XDR.
SDRs are allocated to countries by the IMF. Private parties do not hold or use them. As of March 2011, the amount of SDRs in existence is around XDR 238.3 billion, but this figure is expected to rise to XDR 476.8 billion by 2013.
Famous quotes containing the words special, drawing and/or rights:
“The line that I am urging as today’s conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a repudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“That we shall die, we know; ‘tis but the time,
And drawing days out, that men stand upon.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we’re all so bummed out.”
—Elizabeth Wurtzel, U.S. author. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, p. 298, Houghton Mifflin (1994)