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Refugees arriving in Italian town given notes to be used as local currency
- whack 10y agoCalling it "fake money" is highly misleading (to me at least). This "fake money" system sounds a lot more similar to food stamps or vouchers.
- sctb 10y agoWe updated the title to something less click-baity. We can change it again if someone suggests a better one.
- pimlottc 10y ago"Refugees arriving in Italian town given imitation bank notes as local currency" Still misleading; I thought they were being given counterfeit currency. "Local alternative currency" perhaps?
- paavokoya 10y agoYou're correct. Many have a hard time grasping that currency is not always a governmental endorsed bank note.
- tamana 10y agoThis local scrip is a governmentendorsed banknote
- WalterBright 10y agoAll kinds of things are used as currency. Checks, traveller's cheques, green stamps, credit cards, food stamps, IOUs, frequent flyer miles, coupons, etc. They'll often trade at a discount to their "cash value", depending on transaction costs and the risk that it'll be no good.
- SwellJoe 10y agoI still assumed, with the new title, that it was something cruel rather than clever.
- GrumpyYoungMan 10y agoThe technical term is "scrip", I believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- delbel 10y agoobjectively speaking, all fiat money is fake. the only "real" money would be considered notes backed by hard assets that can be produced on demand, like gold, silver, or other hard assets.
- mark_edward 10y agoWhy is shiny rock more real than pretty paper? It's all a collective hallucination
- jacalata 10y ago"hard assets" means "things that people would want even if the bank that gave them out collapsed". People wanting shiny things is seen as a more reliable collective hallucination than any specific economy.
- paavokoya 10y agoNo, shiny metal has a (mostly guaranteed inflation rate/cannot be printed carelessly) finite supply. Paper (now mostly digital) currency does not.
- kaonashi 10y agoNope, it's all money. The latter has a promise of convertibility by the issuer, but this promise can fail. The only promise that can't fail is the promise to redeem for an alternate form of the same currency (fiat-backed bonds from the issuer, like treasuries e.g.).
- whack 10y agoWe're getting into semantics here, but we need different words to describe fiat money that can practically be used (legally) to obtain real goods, and fiat money that no mainstream merchant is willing to accept. When people say "real money" as opposed to "fake money", they're usually referring to the above distinction.
- yardie 10y agoThat's actually quite crafty. Instead of government assistance being dispersed directly where it can be sent abroad and siphoned off through services like Western Union it's pumped directly into the local economy. This probably can't scale. Once enough money is involved organized crime will find a way to siphon that money out of the community. For example, WIC debit cards can be exchanged 50 cents on the dollar for cash.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pjscott 10y agoThat's nice for the local economy. Not as nice for the non-local people who would have received money but didn't. I bet some of them really could have used the cash. Whether or not this is a good thing overall depends on your priorities, but remember that the consequences of a decision include not only the things that happen because of it but also the things that don't happen because of it -- and the former are much more visible, so it's easy to accidentally forget about the latter.
- mc32 10y agoBut it's the government giving it to them, not foreign aid or remittances. It's not like they are taking money away from them. If I were Italian. I'd like this aspect of helping your people while helping others at the same time. Win-win.
- pjscott 10y agoIf you think I was making a point about what they should do, or what they have a right to do, then... I didn't make myself clear, and I apologize. I'm talking about concrete physical consequences. Who eats and who doesn't; that sort of thing.
- swiftisthebest 10y agoAnd where does government money come from?
- eximius 10y agoI think the key to success here is the credit being drawn from the local government not the immigrants. It's brilliant, frankly.
- danielmorozoff 10y agoHistorically there have been many countries / communities that have used local currencies and private issues of money to enable spending. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency This was especially common during times of economic hardships: wars and famines. Ex. Russian revolution, the pogroms. Things used were food vouchers, lottery tickets, checks and obligations all sorts of things.
- danielmorozoff 10y agoTo add to that there's a large interest from currency collectors. Some interesting issues were money in Jewish ghettos / concentration camps during wwii
- zdkl 10y agoDo you have some links I could read up on, or was this just the set up to a poor joke?
- danielmorozoff 10y agoAbsolutely not a joke... http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/money.html http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/money.... If you are interested/live in NYC there is a library with a ton of research materials on currencies/ history from all over the world at the American Numismatic Society's library: http://numismatics.org/Library/Library http://numismatics.org/Library/Library
- vmarsy 10y agoIt's like Growth hacking for this city. They subsidize the immigrants, in exchange the immigrants are forced to grow the local economy. These migrants could get this money anyways, but 1) the town hides the latency for them. and 2) they actually give more freedom to the migrants on how to spend that money. As long as the migrants don't get robbed and are fine with living there, they're better off with this system.
- harterrt 10y agoIs this definitely a good thing? It seems like Rome has provided a cash stipend to immigrants, but the local government has intervened and restricted the immigrant's purchasing choices. For example, this could be bad for the recipients if local shopkeepers had significantly higher prices than online retailers or if they charged a premium for extending this credit. I see the benefits as well, which seem to be well represented in the other comments so far. I'd be interested to see whether this actually helps everyone in practice.
- vmarsy 10y agoFrom what I understood they are not providing a cash stipend: > €35 (£29; $39) per asylum seeker per day from the central government in Rome. This has to cover everything, from accommodation, food and medical care to Italian language lessons, work placements and assistance with asylum bureaucracy.It also includes a couple of euros for pocket money. What is not clear is: do they give a migrant 35 "fake" euros and tell him to do everything himself, or do they just do this on the food part, but still provide housing etc. An exploit I could think of is if a local Italian goes and buys the migrants "food stamps" for let's say 80% of their price. The migrants would be free to buy anything with real € but he would pay an unnecessary 20% tax to the Italian. And the Italian would be able to buy 20% discounted food. That's not a huge amount of money at stake: Only whatever the Italian consumes in food over the year. And the migrant would need to be stupid/greedy to trade all of his fake € as he also need them for food.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- esac 10y agoas an italian student living on 12€/day which covers rent and bills (6€), food (4€) coffe to study after dinner (0.5€) and unexpected expenses i wonder how those 35€ and for the first time i understand why people are angry at immigration.. (we didn't get scholarships for 2 years because of the lack of money)
- 10y ago
- evanb 10y agoThis reminds me of the Hawaii Overprint Note of US currency during WW2. Perfectly legal---but marked so that were Hawaii to fall it would not enrich Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_overprint_note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_overprint_note
- ocschwar 10y agoGoogle the Worgl Experiment about a town in Austria that did this for their own residents to try to get out of the Great Depression.
- kaonashi 10y agoIt isn't 'fake money' at all. It's every bit as 'money' as Euros, the only difference is the size & scope of the respective issuers.
- cronjobber 10y agoNice and nifty, good for them. Alas, the story illustrates a not-so-nice point some are making: a big incentive for indefinite protraction of the European refugee crisis is the concomitant wealth transfer from tax payers (almost everybody), savers (many), and indigenous workers (many) to businesses (few).
- blue1 10y agoLocal currencies are an interesting thing, but I think that calling these notes "euro" is a big blunder. Even if they are intended to be exchanged at parity, they are definitely not euros. The ECB could not like this.
- chvid 10y agoThis just sounds crazy. What are the credit notes backed by? I assume the shopkeeper can change them to euros. But does the city have enough euros cover all issued notes? Or are they effectively running a ponzi taking the real 35 euros a day from the government and covering the refugee obligation with a credit note. This should not be legal (and probably is not).
- jcbeard 10y agoLegalities aside, there is a long tradition of giving out "fake" money to foreigners that can only be used in exchange for certain goods and services. In turn, local shopkeepers can use the certificates to exchange at some fixed rate for currency. The first time I ever heard about such a scheme was "occupation money." I have some of the German bills around here somewhere from my family members when they were issued them, here's a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_Military_Currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_Military_Currency. I think the best thing about these schemes is that they keep the currency local vs. enabling refugees from (understandably) sending the money back to relatives (who perhaps need it more).
- chvid 10y agoI don't have high thoughts about schemes like this. First off: Why plot pictures of communist leaders on the notes? My guess is that they know what they are doing and want to put the "fog of politics" over it. Don't accept our "patriot dollars"? I guess you hate our freedom, damn french person. Think our "refugee euros" are a ponzi scheme? Nasty racist bigot. Making sure that any discussion of the soundness of the scheme degenerates into a discussion of divisive politics. Secondly: The 35 euros pr. person the state gives the city to cover all expenses of taking in refugees is probably not a windfall. It is probably too little as it needs to cover everything from hospitals, schools, food, housing, processing cost and so on. (And not enough to give cash handouts for the refugees to wire back home.) But if you are a manipulative politician you can use the cash you get from the state to run a ponzi scheme and claim the temporary surge in activity is due to the benifits of multiculturalism, your forward-looking leadership or whatever.
- 10y ago
- Digit-Al 10y agoI'm curious as to how they prevent fraud.