I recently had lunch with a guy that set up telecom networks in ex-soviet bloc countries in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. He worked with Ame

I recently had lunch with a guy that set up telecom networks in ex-soviet bloc countries in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. He worked with American / Euro companies and interfaced with the hard-scrabble governments that were in the power tug-of-war at the time. One of the most complicated tasks he ran into was moving money in-and-out of the countries, largely due to currency de-stabilization. His solution was to buy hundreds-of-tons of grapes in the local currency, and then transport the grapes to Greece where they could be exchanged for international currency. This was in the early 1990s, fairly recent history, but it still baffles me that these sort of problems still exist at the scale that they do.