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01/09/1988
Note Economist 01/09/1988 front cover depicting a new Phoenix world currency stamped “2018” Rising from the ashes of a burning Dollar and other currency notes.

Gotta give credit to TPTB for sticking to long term planning...

Title of article: Get Ready for the Phoenix Source: Economist; 01/9/88, Vol. 306, pp 9-10

From the article:

“THIRTY years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries, and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let’s say, the phoenix. The phoenix will be favoured by companies and shoppers because it will be more convenient than today’s national currencies, which by then will seem a quaint cause of much disruption to economic life in the last twentieth century.

At the beginning of 1988 this appears an outlandish prediction. Proposals for eventual monetary union proliferated five and ten years ago, but they hardly envisaged the setbacks of 1987.”

(Note: the writer is apparently referring here to the events related to October 19, 1987 — often referred to as “Black Monday”— when stock markets crashed in the U.S. and around the world, shedding a huge value in a very short time.)