In 1949, the currency board was replaced by the National Bank of Iraq, which had been founded two years before on November 16, 1947. The National Bank of Iraq became the Central Bank of Iraq in 1956.[2] 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 tradable on the international market for [many] years". Saddam Hussein wielded monetary and the dinar as "a powerful instrument of repression".[3]