How to Use hard currency in a Sentence

hard currency

noun
  • And all of that hard currency can create a major headache for retailers.
    Joe Arrage, Newsweek, 6 Dec. 2024
  • SDRs can be exchanged for hard currency to purchase goods like food and medicine, used to repay debt or held for a rainy day.
    Reader Commentary, Baltimore Sun, 26 June 2024
  • People don’t use them, and the government wants hard currency to be circulated.
    María Soledad Davila Calero, Fortune, 13 Mar. 2024
  • Experts long suspected that Cuba was reselling some of the oil from Venezuela for hard currency.
    Nora Gámez Torres, Miami Herald, 27 Jan. 2026
  • Both of them rely on their foreign-residing nationals for access to hard currency.
    Washington Post Live, Washington Post, 22 July 2024
  • Vital products were in short supply and could only be procured with hard currency on the black market controlled by murky criminals.
    John Kleinheinz, Fortune, 31 May 2023
  • Egyptians are grappling with record inflation, rising poverty and a hard currency shortage.
    Missy Ryan, Washington Post, 8 Sep. 2023
  • The loss of those supplies — and the hard currency Havana earned by reselling part of them — has further squeezed an already fragile economy.
    Antonio María Delgado, Miami Herald, 24 Jan. 2026
  • With depleting foreign exchange reserves, some businesses have been forced to close as entrepreneurs and farmers turn to the black market in search of hard currency.
    Charles Pensulo, semafor.com, 10 Sep. 2025
  • The hard currency of rupee notes is more useful to most women, Ross says, and the cashing-out process has an additional benefit.
    IEEE Spectrum, 4 June 2018
  • Cuba’s economy is desperate for hard currency, and one of the things Havana can sell is its geo-strategic position.
    Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 13 June 2023
  • By hard currency, Dalio is referring to assets outside the financial system.
    Brandon Kochkodin, Forbes.com, 20 Jan. 2026
  • Lebanese citizens, many of them struggling as the country’s economy tanked, simply saw the financial yield from the network’s hot spots as an easy way to make hard currency.
    Jacob Russell, WIRED, 13 Mar. 2023
  • Revenue for Egypt from the Suez Canal – a key source of hard currency for its struggling economy – has halved since the attacks began.
    Jon Gambrell, The Christian Science Monitor, 14 June 2024
  • There is a massive shortage of hard currency across the continent, with many countries facing severe liquidity crunches.
    Boaz Sobrado, Forbes, 9 Mar. 2025
  • Nordhoff's zeal for exports is less about expanding VW's sales and more about bringing in hard currency from outside Germany.
    Alexander Stoklosa, Car and Driver, 31 Aug. 2023
  • Instead, the foreign firms pay the salaries in hard currency to government employment agencies— which pocket the money and pay the Cuban workers in pesos.
    Nora Gámez Torres, Miami Herald, 23 Dec. 2025
  • The country of 105 million people is sinking under foreign debt and contending with a severe shortage of hard currency.
    Claire Parker, Washington Post, 10 Dec. 2023
  • Cuba’s lack of hard currency has affected its ability to import basic necessities.
    Sophia Pargas, NBC News, 25 Nov. 2024
  • India been one of the prime buyers of Russian oil and weapons, providing hard currency to Putin’s government at a time when the G-7 is seeking to starve it of funds.
    Bloomberg.com, 19 May 2023
  • The conglomerate, which is believed to keep most of its hard currency in its own financial institutions or bank accounts abroad, keeps its accounting books out of reach of government auditors.
    Nora Gamez Torres, Miami Herald, 6 Aug. 2025
  • This restructuring is bringing to light the extent to which crypto businesses that pitched themselves as an alternative to banks still rely on those institutions for access to hard currency.
    The Week Staff, The Week, 26 Feb. 2023
  • Those workers could then convert wages in rubles to dollars or euros, potentially becoming a source of the hard currency North Korea desperately needs.
    Kim Tong-Hyung and Jim Heintz, The Christian Science Monitor, 20 June 2024
  • The difference is that rather than collecting hard currency like dollars, scammers are targeting cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin.
    Eamon Barrett, Fortune, 27 Oct. 2023
  • In recent years, China has also supplied a lot of hard currency to Argentina, but Milei is a fervent anti-Communist.
    John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 21 Nov. 2023
  • Thanks to billions of dollars in foreign aid from Western partners, Ukraine's hard currency reserves have grown to nearly $30 billion, slightly higher than at the start of the war.
    Reuters, CNN, 24 Feb. 2023
  • The bolivar’s plunge can be partially explained by the US military’s show of force, as nervous Venezuelans seek to purchase hard currency as a hedge against an uncertain future.
    Stefano Pozzebon, CNN Money, 11 Nov. 2025
  • That’s meant lower revenue for Egypt through the Suez Canal, a vital source of hard currency for the country’s troubled economy, as well as higher costs for shipping that could push up global inflation.
    Jon Gambrell, Fortune Asia, 22 Jan. 2024
  • Yet in dysfunctional economies such as Argentina and Turkey, beset by hyperinflation and a shortage of hard currency, tether is also a lifeline for people.
    Brady Dale, Axios, 12 Sep. 2024
  • Argentines were also buying dollars and removing hard currency deposits from banks as the peso accelerated its already steady depreciation.
    TIME, 23 Oct. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'hard currency.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: