https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/10/30/h...

Not exactly a great example.

Sounds like it was working quite well. Also interest rates as high as 280% only equates to 0.37% that night, considering how short term the disruption they actually survived quite well. The net result the country made out like bandits from the currency traders attack while others fell. “In 1999, the Government started selling those shares by launching the Tracker Fund of Hong Kong, making a profit of about HK$30 billion (US$4 billion).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis

Compared to say Thailand's booming economy came to a halt amid massive layoffs in finance, real estate, and construction that resulted in huge numbers of workers returning to their villages in the countryside and 600,000 foreign workers being sent back to their home countries.[33] The baht devalued swiftly and lost more than half of its value. The baht reached its lowest point of 56 units to the U.S. dollar in January 1998. The Thai stock market dropped 75%. Finance One, the largest Thai finance company until then, collapsed.

Wikipedias

Yeah, that was the so-called "Asian Contagion" financial crisis. IIRC the US dumped a shitload of money into Mexico and maybe some other countries to stop the dominoes falling. Lots of countries had a bad time right around then.

Actually, the maybe-relevant part of this is that Thailand kicked it off by screwing up currency-pegging and having to switch to float, which led to a panic. But Hong Kong didn't suffer particularly hard from it, overall, compared to those worst-affected, so using HK in late 1997 as the example of this practice failing still isn't very strong.

(I can't find any mention of the Mexico thing on the Wiki article, but have a weirdly-strong memory of that specific detail being mentioned in an IPE class years and years ago, so either I'm wrong or it's one of those things that's considered a kind of folk-knowledge poli-sci and economics but doesn't make it to places like Wikipedia, some action that "wasn't" directly connected, but [by common understanding of folks in those fields] totally was—further digging reveals an Argentine event in 1998 that did affect Mexico, so I'm guessing that's what I'm recalling and that at the very least that particular professor considered it obviously true that the two events were connected, so presented that as a continuation of the Asian Crisis in late '97)

[EDIT] To be clear I'm not even going hard into the paint for pegging currencies, I just think that's a bad example and that lots of readers may not recall or be aware of the late 90s crises to have context for it, especially fellow US readers.

Bosnian convertible mark, also pegged to the Euro.

Moroccan dirham, another one pegged to the Euro.

There's a whole list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_circulating_fixed_exch...

I’m not sure if you count the penny (or any other US coin) as “successful” or not, but that peg has not led to calamitous money outcomes for the US currency system.

It’s also due to the difference not being worth the effort most of the time but that doesn’t change the refutation of the claim that no pegs work. The penny peg works even in a world where the actual utility of a 1/100th usd coin is probably negative.

§ 82.1 Prohibitions. Except as specifically authorized by the Secretary of the Treasury (or designee) or as otherwise provided in this part, no person shall export, melt, or treat: (a) Any 5-cent coin of the United States; or (b) Any one-cent coin of the United States.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/82.1.

Click "next" on that link for the special exceptions, which do allow for modifying small amounts of these for jewelry or decoration.

This is actually exactly analogous; many people don't realize that the status quo of "multiple denominations" have ancestral ties to bimetallic currencies of the sort covered in this article.

It would have been difficult for Henry III to de facto outlaw smelting of gold coins because the scale of the gold penny's distribution was much smaller (making attribution of a smelting operation much harder), and because the ability to surveil this sort of activity was severely limited by geography.

But melting down US pennies is de jure illegal (nb: only since 2007 [1]) and the number of pennies you'd need to smelt down in order to justify the effort would probably make the sourcing operation noticeable to authorities.

[1] https://www.usmint.gov/news/press-releases/20061214-united-s...