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Why a Zimbabwean firm offers pensions denominated in cows
- devoutsalsa 4y agoNow we need a Zimbabwean, down to earth, algorithmic stable cow. We’ll call it TerraZIMC, and it will be backed by our free floating crypto currency TerraMoona. If someone milks the system too much & udderly destroys currency, you can take your beef to the chief bullshitter.
- chirau 4y agoLol. Good Pun. On a serious note, that TerraZIMC already exists. It is the Brahman. The value of everything (other cows, cars, wives, houses, insurance policies etc) can be measured in Brahman cows. It is inflation proof as well as it is effectively barter. People love talking about hyperinflation in Zimbabwe and stuff, most people just defaulted to their normal trade. How many Brahman cows is your stuff worth? Oh the price is too small to measure in cows? No problem. A Brahman cow is about 200 chickens on average. So for smaller transactions, how many chickens is your stuff worth? The people who struggled the most during Zimbabwe's hyperinflation were the city people who did not own any animals. For the people in the rural areas, not much changed, besides city people coming and talking crazy numbers. The majority of people live outside the cities and trade as they always do. That chicken can also be divided into heads of corn if need be. The dollar only becomes a concern when you trade with the city kids who have no assets to their name and can only use money.
- imtringued 4y agoI just want honest proof of cattle.
- krapp 4y agoDon't you mean... proof of steak?
- jeffparsons 4y agoAh, steak jokes. A rare medium well-done.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- devoutsalsa 4y agoThis is definitely the preferred method. Proof of work videos would only be attractive to those with an interest in animal husbandry.
- vincent-manis 4y agoAs a side note, our word `pecuniary', referring to money, comes from the Latin word `pecu', meaning `bovine animal'. Reckoning one's wealth in cattle has a long history.
- mistrial9 4y ago"In these parts, it is the pig who is the gentleman that pays the rent" -- Child Bride, 1938
- moksha256 4y agoIndeed...you can trace the origins of the word "capital" to the word "cattle".
- state_less 4y agoIs that why inflationary periods are called bull markets?
- 542458 4y agoBull market doesn’t mean inflationary, it just means that the market trend is upwards. But to your actual question: Not according to Wikipedia at least. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_trend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_trend It seems “Bear Market” came first, and bull market was a play on it.
- zim_throwaway 4y agoI lived in Zim through the hyperinflation and early USD years and knew lots of people working in private schools there. I heard one of them say that school fees were also set to be roughly constant in units of cattle (I forget the exact numbers, it might have been 3 heifers (~2000 USD) per term). Maybe the same idea now with bay area house prices in units of FAANG shares. Everything is constant for those holding (cows, FAANG) and not great for those with (ZD, USD).
- cwilkes 4y agoWell except for Netflix, down 70% over the last year.
- donthellbanme 4y ago[dead]
- mhh__ 4y agoMy reading of that event is to buy some Netflix stock at some point. They started a chain reaction with bad news but as far as I'm aware they might have been able to raise their prices in exchange for a relatively small amount of their customers. That being said I haven't actually verified any numbers so maybe the market is right.
- londons_explore 4y agoEveryone I know is threatening to quit Netflix over the price hike/password sharing crackdown. Yet nobody I know has actually quit. I suspect they might be addicts claiming they can quit anytime...
- paranoidrobot 4y agoI ended up quitting for several reasons. I really liked their content when they first launched here in AU. I have two family members on limited incomes who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it - so I got the top-end plan, specifically because it said something about multiple devices in your family. Then the prices were raised, it became harder to find anything that I wanted to watch (new content I wasn't interested in, and lots of missing older content). I basically stopped using it. Then prices were put up again (twice, I think), at the same time that they started bitching about password sharing/whatever. Then one family member died, and the other stopped using it, so... yeah, I'll keep the $23/month.
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- kache_ 4y agoAmusingly, I denote my asset/liability sheet in the amount of mcdoubles I could afford
- tomcam 4y agoNot amusing it all, but deeply concerning. The obvious choice would be Quarter Pounders. They are vastly superior b/c cooked fresh and don’t cost much more. I am not going to follow your portfolio!
- marvin 4y agoDenotes!! He said he denotes his wealth in Mickey D!! Not invests!! Quarter Pounders are a terrible store of wealth!!
- kqr 4y agoIf this implicitly corrects for exchange-rate risk, inflation, and purchasing power more generally, that's actually not a silly idea.
- chirau 4y agoOver the years, how the McDonalds stock moves has been a good indicator of how both the Food/Beverage market and the Commercial real estate market move. My only qualm would be the menu choice. I would suggest the French Fries. They are more indicative of both demand and Mickey D's cost of production. People buying more "meals" or "combos" at Mickey D's has been positively correlated to average household income and blah blah economic indicators over the years.
- heavenlyblue 4y ago> People buying more "meals" or "combos" at Mickey D's has been positively correlated to average household income and blah blah economic indicators over the years. You are saying it as if it was some sort of a profound piece of information. Of course it's positively correlated with the average household income, this is a typical "eat out experience". There's a bunch of other indicators which are even better correlated with the average household income, for example the "average household income" itself. The better question here would be "does it give me any way of assessing the future of the household income" and I bet it doesn't.
- robocat 4y agoNot too dissimilar to Feeder Cattle commodity futures: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/commodities/gf https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/commodities/gf
- Yenrabbit 4y agoI've watched my parents pensions get wiped out twice. IIRC the first time my dad withdrew a few decades worth of pension and bought a pair of boots. It's been interesting to see alternatives like the one described in the article pop up. Another popular one is property - employees might club together and purchase a small flat every N months and each own some shares in it. Then there is the ever-favoured cash/gold under the mattress approach...
- DeathArrow 4y agoArchive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220515201259/https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2022/05/14/why-a-zimbabwean-firm-offers-pensions-denominated-in-cows https://web.archive.org/web/20220515201259/https://www.econo...
- vishnugupta 4y agoDavid Graeber talks at length about this in his Debt book. At various times in history "unit of account" and "means of settlement" have been two different things. We are used to having a single currency (INR/USD etc.,) perform both the roles; however that needn't be the case. Going back to the earliest times in Mesapatomia, the debt and payments were denominated in silver coins but the actual payment was done in kind (such as food grains, wood). Roman currency continued to be a widely used unit of account in the Middle Ages despite there being no Roman Empire producing the currencies/coins. Because a wide swathe of population had gotten used to that unit of account they just continued; though the payment was settled using whatever they had with them. Brazil used this phenomenon to their advantage to escape from a monetary hole[1]. They created a new currency purely as a unit of account i.e., they didn't print/issue them. Everything was denominated in this new currency so citizens got used to calculating everything in this stable new currency. And then they declared it as their official currency. I am fascinated by history of money and it's interesting to see a phenomenon play out again and again in different contexts. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake-money-saved-brazil https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-...
- kqr 4y agoAnd it only gets more fascinating the more you read about it. I remember Graeber also brought up the example of criminal fees somewhere in western Europe being measured in actual human women even until fairly recently. Maybe at some point did people actually settle damages by transacting in women, but the measurement lived for far longer than the practise. It was just well known how many pigs corresponded to a human woman, and how many grains corresponded to a pig. (This was something scholars studied and found agreement on.) Graeber speculates that this whole idea of precisely measuring what one person owes to another started with criminal codes, fueled by a deeply human sense of tit-for-tat. Only quickly people realised an actual, literal, eye-for-an-eye is impractical, and it's better to conduct the transaction in something other than the specified fee.
- tsimionescu 4y agoIt's fascinating how persistent units of account can be. In Romania, after rampant inflation in the 90s, our currency had stabilized in the 00s at a point where a loaf of bread was something like 5-7000 ROL, while a typical salary was maybe 50M ROL. 1 EUR was maybe 35k ROL. The government then decided in 2005 to slash these extra zeroes, and replaced ROL with RON, at a fixed price of 1RON = 10k ROL. The funny thing is, people got used to the new values for small purchases, but for bigger sums, you still hear plenty of people discussing about things in terms of "hundreds of millions" (implying old ROL) instead of the newer values, 17 years later. This is true even though larger sums are also commonly denominated in euros, and it's easy to compute 100k euros = 500k RON. Still, many still go the extra step and say = 5 billion ROL. Note: both RON and ROL are named "leu/lei" in common usage, but I've used the currency symbols to make it clearer, and because I don't think most would know how to read "lei" (it's read like English "lay" ; for "leu" there's no equivalent, English doesn't have the "eu" diphtong). It's also funny, in the context of this article, that this is the Romanian word for Lion - so I could say my house is worth five hundred thousand lions! The actual etymology is based on a medieval Italian coin with a lion on one of its sides that was widely used in this region (don't remember from which Italian city-state).
- Parker_Powell 4y ago
- surfsvammel 4y agoSo. When you retire, and stop working at your current job, you get cows and you now have a new job… I do hope cows are liquid assets in Zimbabwe in the future.
- chirau 4y agoCows are always liquid assets in Zimbabwe and Africa. They are the currency for dowry (bride price). There is never a day when you cannot liquidate a cow.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoI guess assumptions we have don't hold in Zimbabwe. Retirement age is probably earlier and Retirees are healthier. People have way more children and grand-children (so more family for mutual support and taking advantage of the cattle). Retirement is shorter. Just guessing here.
- skeletal88 4y agoIt is weird to rrad that pensions or benefits are paid by companies, not independent pension funds or the state. I have read enough news titles about companies in the US that have gone bankrupt and people have lost their pensions. The thought that someone works at one company their whole life abd gets their pension from there also seems archaic that
- chirau 4y agoThe pension fund is not from the company. The company merely contributes on your behalf. In Zimbabwe, it is called NSSA, a government managed entity.
- piokoch 4y agoAhh, fond memories. When the communism was giving its last breath in Poland in 1989, inflation got pretty high - around 40 percent a year. I had a private English language lessons with a student and we were adjusting lesson price to the price of eggs. This guy had friends in London so he spent a lot of time there working (those were happy times when Policeman was not allowed to ask you if you have a work permit and having a government issues ID was considered as a disgrace to human dignity), so he was a very fluent speaker plus he was bringing to Poland luxuries like Melody Maker magazine that I was laboriously reading, fascinated (I was and I am big music fun).
- nathias 4y agooxen were the original unit of account, it isn't weird that when your new tech fails you revert to using old tech
- t43562 4y agoIn effect it's a giant work camp/prison. You look like you're free and you can leave if you manage to get the money and some kind of visa but otherwise your money inflates away to nothing and somehow this doesn't affect the elite who seem to have all the US$. Diamond wealth simply vanishes - $15 billion or something like that? You're basically working for them for nothing. There are many to blame, not least us Zimbabweans, but special thanks to Henry Kissenger for pushing us into the hands of the Russian and Chinese backed "liberation" movements just 9 years before the Berlin wall came down.
- e2e4 4y agoJapan used to use rice as currency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_currency
- bayesian_horse 4y agoThose contracts are mooh-tially benefitial..
- slashdev 4y ago"In the late 1990s, the government instituted land reforms intended to evict white landowners and place their holdings in the hands of black farmers. However, many of these "farmers" had no experience or training in farming. Many farms simply fell into disrepair or were given to Mugabe loyalists." " From 1999 to 2009, the country experienced a sharp drop in food production and in all other sectors. The banking sector also collapsed" Looking past the racial issues, what this was is a socialist redistribution of wealth away from a productive educated class to an unproductive, uneducated and corrupt class. It's economic suicide, if only the corrupt government had been educated enough to recognize it. The results were predictable. South Africa is flirting around the edges of doing something like this. I hope the example of their northern neighbor is enough to stay their hands.
- egorfine 4y agoTime for a cow-pegged stablecoin.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]