European Currency Unit opportunity for foreign diversification without reliance on the currency of a single country. The ECU was conceived on 13 March 1979 as an internal accounting unit. It had the ISO 4217 currency code XEU. On 1 January 1999, the euro (with the code EUR and symbol €) replaced the ECU, at the value €1 = 1 ECU. Unlike the ECU, the euro is a real currency, although not all member states participate (for details on euro membership see Eurozone). Two of the countries in the ECU basket of currencies, UK and Denmark, did not join the eurozone, and a third,
Currency substitution financial assets denominated in a foreign currency. It can also occur as a gradual conversion to full currency substitution, for example, Argentina and Peru were both in the process of converting to the U.S. dollar during the 1990s. "Dollarization", when referring to currency substitution, does not necessarily involve use of the United States dollar. The currencies that have been used as substitutes have been the US dollar, the euro, and the Australian dollar. After the gold standard was abandoned at the outbreak of World War I and the Bretton Woods Conference following World War II, some countries sought exchange rate