Black Market Dollars Put Egyptian Economy on Alert: Currencies
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When two Egyptian banks refused to give Ahmed El-Rifai the dollars his digital media company needed to pay Facebook Inc. last month, he turned to a more reliable source: the black market at a premium of about 8 percent.
“I even had to wait two days to be able to cash a dollar check at the bank,” El-Rifai, 33, managing director of Cairo-based Egyweb, which sells online ads for Facebook, said by phone Feb. 5.