Allow me to remind you that some countries, such as Romania and the Baltic states, had to base their adjustment not on the freeze, but on a significant cut in nominal wages. In Serbia, the process of reducing consumption was aided by the flexible exchange rate, which lowered real wages and other income through nominal depreciation and higher import prices.
*  *  *  Before this revolution in information availability, most 20th-century business decision-making had been hampered by pervasive uncertainty. Owing to the paucity of timely knowledge of customers’ needs and of the location of inventories and materials flowing throughout complex production systems, businesses required substantial programmed redundancies to function effectively.