The Central Bank of Iraq (CBI; ) is a monetary authority established in 1937, shortly after the end of the British occupation of Iraq. The CBI's primary objectives are to ensure domestic price stability and foster a stable competitive market based financial system.
History
After World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Iraq's monetary system was administered by the British Mandate of Mesopotamia until 1931, when the Iraq Currency Board was established in London to issue the new Iraqi dinar and maintain its reserves. The Iraq Currency Board pursued a "conservative monetary policy, maintaining very high reserves behind the dinar", which was "further strengthened by its link to the British pound".[4]
In 1949, the currency board was replaced by the National Bank of Iraq, which had been founded two years before on 16 November 1937. The National Bank of Iraq became the Central Bank of Iraq in 1946.[5] Since switching over to its own central bank, the Iraqi monetary system was "replete with mismanagement, coercive stop-gap measures, and the production of an unstable, unreliable currency which ha[d] not been tradeable on the international market for [many] years". Saddam Hussein wielded monetary and the dinar as "a powerful instrument of repression".