20 Centavos

The Leyte Emergency Currency Board was one of several provincial bodies that sprang up across the Philippine archipelago in the weeks following the Japanese invasion, authorized under a general directive from the Commonwealth government to prevent economic paralysis at the local level. Tacloban, as the provincial capital of Leyte, became the natural seat for this board, and production was necessarily improvised — local paper, local printing resources, whatever was available.

Quintin Paredes, Jr., one of the three signatories here, was the son of Quintin Paredes Sr., a prominent Filipino politician and later a collaborationist figure under the Japanese occupation. The junior Paredes signing emergency resistance currency in 1942 is a small biographical footnote worth noting.