They have been discovering scads of rupiah stuffed in socks and waist pouches of departing passengers. Six people in the western city of Medan were recently stopped from boarding a flight to Singapore. Some come with suitcases full of rupiah. He is asking friends who are paid in U.S. dollars to come to him if they need rupiah.
Businesses are desperate too.
Very few Indonesian letters of credit are being honored, so most trade financing is at a standstill. Billions of dollars in foreign-denominated loans are not being serviced. Thailand and South Korea are also bombed out, but Indonesia seems terminal. The pain of the country's 200 million shell-shocked citizens is only beginning. There goes the artificially low prices of gas, cooking oil, bread and other commodities that have made life bearable to the country's hardscrabble millions.