The Liberian dollar is the national currency of Liberia. The ISO 4217 code is LRD. It is commonly written as L$.

Exchange rate

April 11, 2005

1 United States dollar = 50.00 LRD

1 Liberian Dollar (LRD) = 0.02000 US Dollar (USD)

History

Liberia historically used the United States Dollar as legal tender, augmenting USD coin and paper with LRD coins of 1c, 5c, 10c, 25c, 50c, and 1 dollar. The flight of suitcase-loads of USD paper in the economic collapse following the April 12, 1980 coup d'état created a currency shortage, which was only exacerbated when the government began minting $5 coins. Unfortunately the 7-sided coins were the same size and weight as the one-dollar coin; this similarity was frequently abused by traders.

In the late 1980s the coins were largely replaced with a newly-designed $5 bill modeled after the USD greenback. The design was modified during the 1990-2004 civil war to ostracize bills looted from the Central Bank of Liberia. This effectively created two currency zones -- the new bills were legal tender in government-held areas (primarily Monrovia), while the old bills were legal tender in non-government areas. Each was of course illegal in the other territory.

With the election of the Charles Taylor government in 1997 a new series of bills were printed in denominations of $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100, and are in current use.