The word 'rupiah' is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to the currency of Indonesia. For example, "The Indonesian rupiah is the official currency of Indonesia."
For that, thank falling global oil prices: even without subsidy, a litre of petrol now costs 7,600 rupiah, down from a subsidised 8,500 rupiah in December.
India's foreign-exchange reserves are finite—Indonesia has blown through a fifth of its buffer trying to defend the rupiah, with no noticeable effect.
And the benefits typically flowed not to the poor, which was their supposed justification, but to Indonesia's car-owning middle classes.The country's finance minister, Bambang Brodjonegoro, reckons the savings will be in the order of 200 trillion rupiah, or nearly $16 billion.
INDONESIA'S president, Joko Widodo, began the new year knowing that he will now have trillions of fresh rupiah to spend that his predecessors have lacked.
Small subsidies (1,000 rupiah, or eight cents, per litre) will remain in place for diesel, used for public transport and by the country's millions of fishermen.
With its 210m people, turmoil in Indonesia evokes nightmares among its neighbours: in the short term, economic stagnation; in the long term, waves of refugees, pirate-infested seas and a power vacuum to be filled by competitors such as China.Already some signals are flashing red: the Indonesian currency, the rupiah, has been plumbing depths not seen for three years.
Yet Indonesia's rupiah has rallied by 3.3% against the dollar the most among major emerging-market currencies.
The government is now likely to spend as much as 100 trillion rupiah on the subsidies or twice as much as it has budgeted to rebuild the tsunami-stricken province of Aceh.
Indeed, when Pertamina, Indonesia's state-owned oil company, ran low on stocks last month, and so began buying up dollars to pay for imports, the rupiah plunged.
He has declared his net worth as 4.5 billion rupiah ($500,000), compared with Miss Megawati's 75 billion rupiah.
The 55 local lawmakers, it turned out, had awarded themselves various perks and allowances amounting to 300m rupiah per person per year, on top of their normal salary.
