9 ms·

What is going on in Argentina?

84 points by yakkomajuri 3y ago

diggan 3y ago
I submitted a transcript from Javier Milei's address at the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, which I think explains a bit about what is happening, and what is about to happen, from the eyes of the newly elected president who has pretty strong and "out of the ordinary" opinions and ideas. It got some upvotes, but sadly no discussions at all. Highly relevant when discussing Argentina at the moment though, but keep in mind this is just one extreme perspective, one side of the coin so to say: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39436291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39436291 (https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/javiermileiworldeconomicforum54.htm https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/javiermileiworldec...)
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I don't think it's that extreme of a perspective. I'm surprised that the perspective he's speaking against, which when implemented reliably causes citizen impoverishment and death should be spoken about more in those terms, I think.
  - alchemist1e9 3y ago
    Exactly! We are driving our future off a cliff by allowing collectivism to return over libertarianism. For example his perspective would be very consistent with the perspectives of the founding fathers of the United States. The Founding Fathers would have widely agreed with the speech’s support for free-market capitalism and its critique of collectivism, socialism, and excessive state intervention. Advocating principles that promote economic freedom and prosperity would resonate with them as a reflection of their own efforts to create a government that promotes individual liberty and economic opportunity. celebration of the entrepreneur as a hero of prosperity and its warning against state overreach would likely find broad support among the Founding Fathers. They were, after all, establishing a new nation built on principles of liberty, property rights, and opposition to tyranny. The speech’s call for economic freedom and limited government intervention mirrors the Founding Fathers’ debates on the proper role and size of government. Many of the Founding Fathers, like Alexander Hamilton, would likely support the speech’s endorsement of free-market capitalism. The emphasis on economic freedom and the role of free enterprise in lifting people out of poverty would resonate with his and similar Founders’ views on economic development. Yet somehow this is generally considered the majority opinion today of his speech: > has pretty strong and "out of the ordinary" opinions and ideas
    - slibhb 3y ago
      That whole debate wouldn't have made sense to the founding fathers. Yes they were liberals, but "capitalism" wasn't coined until the 19th century. Milei is quite extreme when he claims that markets can't fail. He's trying to move Argentina in the right direction. I would have voted for him. But that's an extreme claim and is rejected by most economists.
      - alchemist1e9 3y ago
        I respectfully disagree in that perhaps some vocabulary would need altering to use words they were more familiar with, but free markets and free enterprise, along with property rights and low taxation was exactly their founding perspective. Regarding “most economists” it would depend on how broad you allow the claim of being an economist is a valid one. We have literal socialist and marxists claiming to be economists. That’s as absurd as creationists claiming to be evolutionarily biologists. Those are perspectives that are empirically proven to be rubbish yet due to human instinctual biases persist for long periods of time. Eventually collectivism, socialism, and marxism should be banished to the gutters of history, the only question is how much more pain and suffering will it take before human civilization decides to include proper social and economic science as part of core education curriculum, like evolution is taught in most places today.
        slibhb 3y ago
        You're ranting about marxists...but the question is whether markets can fail. Milei says no. But there are plenty of examples of markets failing so, if we take that idea seriously, it reduces to something like "free markets have never been tried". What does that remind you of?
        alchemist1e9 3y ago
        Please provide the examples of market failures and I suspect on closer examination you will discover State failure, not market failures.
  - notahacker 3y ago
    Perhaps, if you have never been to the West - the object of Milei's criticism - it is possible to believe that it is a world where people are impoverished and dying through evil collectivists providing welfare states. For everyone else, that's a perspective as extreme as his chainsaw stunts. Milei's bark is likely to prove more extreme than his bite, of course. He's already pointedly not abolishing the central bank and quietly mending relations with China.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > where people are impoverished and dying through evil collectivists providing welfare states Your perspective is too non-collectivism skewed. The West is a mish-mash, but it's the bastion of economic liberalism and capitalism. Those are so effective that they can pay for all sorts of social policies without affecting the productivity too much of the people making the money. You should be thinking about the millions starved and killed in China or Russia or now Argentina when you think of the problems of collectivism. Thinking of somewhere like Sweden as a collectivist paradise is wrong - there are plenty of billionaires there. It's easy to pay for "free" stuff when there's plenty to go round, and the plenty is generally not provided by a collectivist state. There are plenty of people who think that eating the rich would pay for everything. They think billionaires actually have yearly billions in cash to pay for social entitlements, rather than one-off ownership of valuable companies. That's the worry that's being discussed.
      - notahacker 3y ago
        No, my perspective is based on actually reading the actual words of his actual speech which includes lines like "the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism". He explicitly isn't saying anything about the Holodomor or the Great Leap Forward, and he is criticising the leaders of the United States, the EU, the UK and Sweden for being too "collectivist" (and suggesting that neoclassical economics is insufficiently supportive of capitalism because it concedes market distribution might not always be perfect!) The world doesn't lack defences of capitalism or criticisms of the USSR and Latin American socialism, nuanced and otherwise. But the perspective of equating the policy stance of the Biden or Macron or Sunak administration on welfare and regulation with Stalinism or Maoism or even Chavismo is the definition of extremism, and not even high-quality, evidence-based extremism.
- larodi 3y ago
  Interestingly Cowen and Tabarrok follow this topic closely on Marginal Revolution. also some interesting insights in the comments section there, which is mostly economics-oriented. https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=Argentina https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=Argentina (advise: skip all other random talk about AI, LLMs and ML stuff, you may easily get outraged)
- kragen 3y ago
  thanks, this is great
- gausswho 3y ago
  This speech has no legs to stand on. His key premise conflates the industrial revolution with a special definition of capitalism. Which for his ideology has perfect price discovery and a world where no large corporations collude with other. His main course is your usual slab of blaming socialism, sprinkled with side blame at feminists and environmentalists. I don't see anything worth reading here. It is deceptive with intent and fundamentally unhinged.
  - diggan 3y ago
    I don't necessarily agree or disagree with Milei, I think my understand of the space and the country is too low to be able to do so. But I disagree with "I don't see anything worth reading here", even if it's unhinged and you fundamentally disagree with their point of view. He is the democratically elected president of a country in despair, and trying to understand what will happen to the country requires understanding the motivations behind the actions, which are laid bare in his speech, no matter how factual his points are.
    - gausswho 3y ago
      I half agree. It is helpful up to a point to know what demogogues might be hatching. But I don't agree that his words describe the actual sources of Argentine despair, even among those who voted for him.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > I think explains a bit about what is happening, and what is about to happen There is a lot of distance between promising economic changes and getting a positive outcome. His path seems to include a lot of reducing income to the government, privatization of government services and shuttering government branches that promote sciences, etc. I think he wants to recreate Alabama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Javier_Milei#Social_views https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Javier_...
  - ImJamal 3y ago
    I'm sure a lot of Argentinians would love to live in a place as stable and prosperous as Alabama.
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      I'd agree that Alabama can't thwart all of the prosperity it gains from being one of the weakest components of the largest economy in history. Without that massive, continuous boost, it seems difficult to imagine AL rising to even the worst assumptions of Argentina.
      - ImJamal 3y ago
        Compare the inflation rates between Alabama and Argentina. Alabama is significantly better. Compare the GDP per capita. Oh that is right, Alabama is better. Is there any spot where Argentina is more stable or prosperous than Alabama?
        WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        Sure. Because even as the ~weakest part of the US, it's still part of the US and gets to ride that tide. Fully severed and deprived of any US privilege, it's leadership could quickly face any number of newsworthy options like mass die offs due to minimal health care and low vaccination rates, being overthrown by a Latin / South American interest or dying in a bloody coup because they couldn't muster enough resources to complete their 10000 Sweltering Gulags plan fast enough.
tomrod 3y ago
Sounds like a lot of arbitrage for the patient.
- pjc50 3y ago
  This activity is in the "illegal but overlooked almost everywhere" category, so as soon as you start making significant money out of it you'll hit problems.
ricotico060 3y ago
Argentina has been like this for a very long time. I studied abroad there in 2019 and it was exactly the same. I believe one of the reasons Brian Armstrong started Coinbase was because he saw how devastating inflation was to Argentina’s economy. Argentina was at one point a top 20 country in the world wealth wise and has obviously gone very down hill. It’s too bad, a lot of talented tech workers there.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Argentina didn't really go down hill. Constant GDP per capita is up ~50% from 1960: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDARG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDARG The GDP of the rest of the world went up a lot more than that [1] - and Argentina never did anything besides have decent weather and a roughly constant amount of fertile land. It's kind of like a Dutch Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=eMGt https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=eMGt
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    People didn't really need smartphones, laptops and even personal cars in 1960s in Argentine. I believe they generated that GDP while being mostly rural, where it translates to a lot of amenities. Now they would usually be cramped in a city where the effective cost of living is much greater (leading to villas), whereas their GDP and thus income didn't grow much.
    - Wytwwww 3y ago
      70-80%+ of the population was already living in urban areas in the 60s though.
      - thriftwy 3y ago
        Perhaps we've spotted a case for sloggy Argentinean growth, since the country doesn't strike me as being an industrial giant or a R&D hub - what would they all do living in urban areas?
verticalscaler 3y ago
“To give you have an idea, within the first 2 days in Argentina, I dealt with over five different rates. A restaurant actually offered me the proper blue rate (1100) to pay for the bill, whereas one cueva (informal exchange house) offered me 1050 and another 1070. The kiosk where I bought a SIM card from had it at 1060, and Uber, who did the currency conversion themselves rather than leaving it up to my credit card, did it at 1000.” Ah, no. You do the cambio in downtown Buenos Aires once for the whole trip. Random restaurants offering you different rates or inflating your bill is simply people trying to take advantage of a foreigner.
- nottorp 3y ago
  There's that thing about the largest bill being 2000 pesos atm, and even that being rare. You might need a bag to carry cash for the whole trip, and it will attract the wrong kind of attention?
  - bitdivision 3y ago
    This is very accurate. Normally western union will give you notes of 1000 pesos, which is just about manageable in pockets if you're getting a few hundred dollars. I had one instance where there was only one western union I could use (because of the weekend) and they only had 100 and 200 peso notes. I walked out with 300 dollars worth of notes in a black bin bag and hurriedly tried to find a taxi before anyone noticed...
- broken_clock 3y ago
  I am told as of last year, if you pay for things with Visa or Mastercard credit, they give you the blue dollar rate as well.
  - deleted 3y ago
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- tiborsaas 3y ago
  Exactly, EUR/HUF rates would be infuriating in Hungary if I wanted to pay with EUR in restaurants.
kingofthehill98 3y ago
They elected a freakin' maniac and they're gonna pay a heavy price for that. In Brazil we have a saying "pior que tá não fica", which translates to something like "it cannot get worse than this". Belive me when I say this: it can (and probably will) get worse. It can (and probably will) get SO MUCH worse. We tasted this poison with 4 years of Bolsonaro trying to get away from the establishment. What did we get in return? 700k brazilians died to COVID, we now have a huge anti-vax problem and after the piece of shit lost the election he attempted a COUP. Luckily he's going to jail on the next few months, but the damage is done.
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  Did you read the article?
- luzojeda 3y ago
  The alternative was the economy minister largely responsible of how we got to where we are now. Minister of a president who basically said "you know what I'm out" in 2022 and basically gave the government to said minister.
  - alkonaut 3y ago
    > The alternative was the economy minister largely responsible of how we got to where we are now. That's the problem though. It's completely understandable to vote against that. But to have one option to the status quo, and that option is this? It's basically like you have lived beyond your means for a long while and you live in a too big house and the sensible solution might be to get another job, sell the car and move to a smaller place. But see that choice doesn't exist. Your choice is to keep aggregating debt, OR you burn the house down and live in a tent. The problem with very bitter medicine like this is that it risks swinging back the other way just as fast when people become angry enough.
  - deleted 3y ago
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- swarnie 3y ago
ajot 3y ago
So, a regular Tuesday in Argentina. You grow insensitized to it through the years. Last time I got surprised (and laughed hard at the evil genius) was when last administration kept the conversion rate artificially low, but created a tax for buying dollars for saving. > Just please let’s do better lunches than milanesa con papas next time, deal? Science hasn't made that breakthrough yet :)
7thaccount 3y ago
For those not keeping up with the news, Argentina used to be an extremely wealthy country, but went the reverse route many decades ago and has embraced peronism for awhile (kind of a mixture of socialism and fascism) that has led to rampant inflation. They recently elected Javier Milei (an economist and former sex guru) who although some media claim is a radical rightwing candidate, center-right Libertarian might be more descriptive. He essentially wants to radically reduce government's role and put the country through (economic shock therapy) in the short term so they can have a chance of making a turn around. He has fired a huge amount of government staff he calls the "parasitic class" and I think they just recently actually balanced the budget for the first time in a decade. We'll see how things go. He's trying to get the country on the dollar and off the peso, so they'd just have to deal with the more sensible American inflation rate. It also makes some sense as everyone wants to use the dollar anyway and are basically doing it illegally. He is also removing a lot of government red tape for businesses. He recently flew to Davos and basically told off those in attendance. Some of the things he says I agree with, but many others not so much. He seems to take a lot of Austrian economics views and if you're not familiar with this, it is essentially the ideology that folks like Ron Paul and a lot of the libertarian think tanks (e.g. Cato institute) proclaim. He said a lot of things that are counter to basic economics like "market failures don't exist". I think he believes that given no regulations, things would always sort themselves out, but zero regulations brings about another kind of hell IMO. He also pulled Argentina out of the BRICS negotiations (kind of a very loose federation of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as he didn't want to get involved with communists. Only time will tell if this will be a huge failure or just what the country needs.
- ramblerman 3y ago
  I think this is a pretty fair assessment of Milei. Do you feel the sex guru part adds much though? Maybe he is in an open relationship, or actually gay, or xyz... does it matter in his economic reform plans for Argentina?
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    He isn't a lifelong politician, so when the media describes him, they refer to his career in the private sector which as far as I'm aware includes two jobs. One was as an economist and the other as a "sex guru" of some kind. I have no idea what all that involved (mainly been following the economic reforms). If he had been an electrician beforehand they would have said economist and electrician. Some may try to use it to try to throw shade i suppose. I was using it in the sense of being complete.
bitdivision 3y ago
I was there a few months ago. For me (without dollars), the best way to get cash was to western union it to myself. They tend to have rates at or around the dollar blue rate. The only painful part of this is that if you send yourself more than around $100 you're going to have to try various western union shops before finding one with enough cash. The other thing to note is that Mastercard (and Visa I believe) have a newer rate specifically aimed at tourists (the MEP rate), which normally stays closer to the informal rate (blue dollar rate). Annoyingly they tend to charge your account with the official rate, and then refund the difference a few days later. There's also this website which has a view of all the different rates: https://bluedollar.net/ https://bluedollar.net/
- impostervt 3y ago
  I did this with my sister who was digital nomading in Argentina a few months ago. The easiest thing we found was for me to send her $3k via western union, which converted into an ungodly amount of pesos she picked up down there. It was super sketchy. When I sent the money, the western union person said there was a chance western union would block it because it was such a large amount, but luckily it went through. When my sister picked it up, they basically stuffed it into a backpack to carry around. Seemed very dangerous to be carrying that much cash (even in the US it would be), but it worked out ok.
  - bitdivision 3y ago
    Yep, western union do tend to have a long kyc check after your first transfer I think. Which can delay things a few days. But after that I never really had a problem. I never heard of anyone getting their transaction completely blocked though.
Havoc 3y ago
Once financial systems collapse a lot of things stop making any sort of sense. Behaviours and incentives change. You saw the same in Zim
- rwmj 3y ago
  I visited the Soviet Union right at the tail end, and it sounds similar. Official exchange rate (4 rubles to the dollar), street exchange rate (12+ rubles), a mix of shops and restaurants taking dollars unofficially, and people were generally ... fine with it? The economy obviously wasn't working, but everyone was housed, fed and clothed.
  - Wytwwww 3y ago
    The ruble was not convertible to foreign currencies prior to that though. If you lived there you could only exchange it for dollars/marks/etc. if you were travelling and only a very limited amount (and of course only well-connected people were allowed to do that anyway). Besides international trade which was fully controlled by the state the USSR wasn't a part of the global financial system. The ruble was more like a token or a scrip (with very limited uses) rather than a real currency. Which is why the state managed to keep a lid on stuff there, there was almost no way for goods/money/people to get in or out at any significant scale.
  - moltar 3y ago
    I remember that time. The prices were often set in “UE” (uslovniye edinitsi) translated as “conventional units”, which were of course understood by everyone to be USD. Because using any non-ruble currency for official purposes was illegal.
- beAbU 3y ago
  Zim's inflation was several orders of magnitude worse than this though.
ekvintroj 3y ago
It’s the shock doctrine again.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Argentina has been both badly treated by the international financial system AND completely failed to fix their own problems. After agricultural export collapsed mid-century they've failed to develop better export industries except a bit of tourism.
  - is_true 3y ago
    We have two problems: corruption and some organizations pushing against us. https://www.greenpeace.org/argentina/campanas-ganadas/ https://www.greenpeace.org/argentina/campanas-ganadas/ Greenpeace helped ban salmon farming. They also tried to stop offshore oil exploration, they just delayed it. This is the kind of things we cannot accept
    - pjc50 3y ago
      Blaming leftists and outsiders for all your problems is probably a core part of why Argentina remains unable to fix itself.
      - is_true 3y ago
        You should read the comment again. You missed a keyword.
kragen 3y ago
this is a pretty good post if you're interested in what the fuck is going on in argentina, you might try git clone http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git and read milei-diary.md, which are my observations here on the ground, after having lived here most of my adult life. it's been a few weeks since i added an entry to it, but i'll update it again soon one minor problem with the post: 'the white rate' is a phrase this blogger made up; if you talk to people about 'the white rate' or 'el dólar blanco' or 'el tipo de cambio blanco' nobody will have any idea what you're talking about
- nmeofthestate 3y ago
  I'm not going to clone a git repo to read a file, but I did waste some time clicking around your site trying to find this file that you mentioned, to no avail. Just FYI.
  - kragen 3y ago
    yeah, as far as i know, it's only available by git cloning. it doesn't benefit me if you read it, just you, so it's fine with me if you don't read it. i'm only mentioning it for the sake of the people who would find it interesting i mean, in theory, you could do this in Python >>> print(zlib.decompress(urlopen( 'http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git/objects/03/220089fdc6713fc459ac71da35d6c8abb5b110' ).read()).decode('utf-8')) but it's easier to just clone the repo reading the file is going to take you an hour or two, so if spending an extra thirty seconds to clone the repo is a significant cost in this context, you probably shouldn't start
    - nmeofthestate 3y ago
      OK - I wont bother. Just letting you know, as you were downvoted a bunch when I commented.
- 4gotunameagain 3y ago
  Beware, exploits have been found in the past where cloning a repo allows remote code execution.
JojoFatsani 3y ago
[flagged]
- gruez 3y ago
  Wouldn't that be something like Somalia? There's very evidently a state in Argentina, even though it's massively mismanaged.
- cbeach 3y ago
  Actually the Government has been Peronist (which many consider to be equivalent to socialist) in Argentina from WW2 to 1970, and then from 1989 onwards. A large government spending lots of money. Add in wage and price controls (classic authoritarian leftwing policies), and economic ruin was an inevitability Inflation has nothing to do with libertarianism and everything to do with a state that tried to run everything and inevitably failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_Argentina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_Argentina
  - kragen 3y ago
    you are incorrectly conflating socialism with peronism, which is more fascist than socialist, though it certainly has socialist factions within it
    - cbeach 3y ago
      Peronism is relevant, but its an unhelpful term, as its meaning has mutated over the year with different "Peronist" leaders. But fundamentally (if you look at the twenty tenets of Peronism) it is a populist leftwing ideology that aligns strongly with trade unions, social justice and economic nationalism. We can argue the toss as to whether this implies it is "socialist" or not, but it's certainly far from free market capitalism.
      - kragen 3y ago
        yes, it is certainly about as far as you can get from free-market capitalism, but not in the same direction as socialism what you said was, 'Actually the Government has been socialist in Argentina from WW2 to 1970, and then from 1989 onwards', when in fact the numerous socialist parties in argentina have held the presidency or a majority in congress for a sum total of exactly zero days during that time clearly what you're referring to there is peronism, not socialism, and you're also unaware of the administrations of frondizi and the various military dictatorships before 01970
luzojeda 3y ago
>And Argentinians, thank you and best of luck. Just please let’s do better lunches than milanesa con papas next time, deal? Milanesas are a godsend tbh though
- yakkomajuri 3y ago
  Knew this would be a bit of a contentious point! Have you seen how we do lunches in Brazil though? (search for images about 'self service brasil' for instance)
  - is_true 3y ago
    Milanesa is about simplicity. Search "milanesa napolitana a caballo". But to be honest: empanadas > milanesas
    - yakkomajuri 3y ago
      Note: I actually like milanesas quite a bit. Just struggled with the fact that lunch was either grabbing a few empanadas or milanesa con papas :D would have loved a bit more diversity!
  - luzojeda 3y ago
    Damn, they look amazing, planning to visit our neighbours soon, will be sure to find a place with something like that. I think we are simpler fellows regarding food but we enjoy them a lot :P
pjc50 3y ago
Some background: https://www.ft.com/content/09e9e924-5ba9-11e9-9dde-7aedca0a081a https://www.ft.com/content/09e9e924-5ba9-11e9-9dde-7aedca0a0... "Argentina’s foreign exchange regime is broken" and https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557753649/ch011.xml https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557753649/ch01... "Multiple Exchange Rate Systems: The Case of Argentina" Fixed exchange rates are effectively an import subsidy. This staves off the problems of massive price spikes in things like petrol and medicines, but devalues the (already struggling) exports. At least Argentina is self-sufficient in food.
thriftwy 3y ago
The current blue rate is 1100 but it was 13 when we visited Argentine 10 years ago. Back then, 100 peso bank note was actually quite convenient. Peso lost value hundredfold in a decade. Go figure. The whole country has left a disorganized feel back then, so when we hopped the border over to Chile we felt we're having a vacation in a vacation.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
[flagged]
rcorin 3y ago
Booking.com shows the price in official pesos, thats why she charged 200usd as 160k ars, when you pay domestically. She didnt make you a cut.
marcodiego 3y ago
I've been there in 2011. Wonderful place. At the time Brazil was recovering from the 2008 crises, which was very light for us, and our economy was probably at its top. I had my first job as a programmer and was very well payed compared to locals. I saved all the money to travel there and pay all expenses for me and my girlfriend in about just 4 months; that's how strongly we were economically. At the time 1 Brazilian real was worth 2 Argentinian pesos and 1 USD was worth less than 2 BRL. At the time, Cristina Kirchner had just won elections and BsAs was full of her posters. Being there at the time felt like being in Europe HDI with south american prices; it was that good and cheap. Cities were beautiful, clean, organized, I spent some time in La Plata which seemed designed in simcity, felt much safer than Brazil and although there were already some signs of decadence like some poor people around, it still looked much better than Brazil. Around 2014 Argentina had already entered in crises, and so did Brazil. At my job, a new colleague was from Argentina. I think he was a level-headed liberal, he sometimes talked about something like how the situation there was. By that time, 1 BRL was worth around 4 pesos and 1 USD was worth 2.35 BRL. Two years ago (2022) I talked with a friend. I explained him how in 2011 I could save all the money to travel Argetina in just 4 months, I couldn't do the same now even if I get twice the salary I had at the time: our prices increased a lot and even though at the time 1 BRL was worth more than 30 pesos! Now, here we are in 2024: 1 BRL is worth around 170 pesos, 1 USD is close to 5 BRL. The article says: "We were mostly left with the impression that it wouldn’t be so bad to turn into Argentina after all.", " I felt safer in most places than I do anywhere in Brazil", "I had an incredible time in Argentina. The country is absolutely stunning, and the people are also fantastic.". Actually it is not Brazil who may turn into Argentina, but Argentina which is turning into Brazil after a long effort to keep social indexes high... artificially or not. We in Brazil also had our own hyper-inflation period. It happened during the 80's. Prices were so volatile that my father bought things and wrote in boxes what the price was in liters of gasoline, so he could have an idea of how much it had really cost. We took a long time to reach stability, from the 90's to early 2000's, but we got there and I hope Argentina will be able to do the same. Although Brazil and Argentina are seen as rivals, I really love that country and people and wish them the best.
- Urahandystar 3y ago
  Is it true the Brazil Real is named after that currency crisis. Meaning the real rate of the currency or just urban legend?
koolba 3y ago
> It also didn’t just stop there. January saw a 20% inflation rate, meaning from the day we crossed the border from Uruguay to Argentina to the day we crossed the border back to Brazil, about a month later, prices were about 20% higher. That’s not a 20% inflation rate. It’s a monthly amount. That’s a 1.2^12 - 1 = 791.60% inflation rate.
- rglullis 3y ago
  "inflation rate" does not necessarily means annual rate, so it will depend on the context. For those that never lived through hyperinflation, they rarely see it discussed in terms of month-over-month comparison, but someone in Argentina, Venezuela or 80/90s Brazil would just assume that "20% inflation" means "monthly".
  - koolba 3y ago
    Unless otherwise specified, rates are assumed to be annualized. That’s standard for everything from mortgages to inflation as it allows for an apples to apples comparison. My point with showing the annualized calculation was so that those of us in the rest of the world, the majority of people on this site, could better grasp the severity of the problem. In the USA we’ve had about 20% inflation in consumer goods (or at least according to CPI) in the past three years and it’s been a hot topic. The Argentina numbers are staggering.
  - beAbU 3y ago
    Not sure if I'll call this hyper inflation though? At it's peak, Zimbabwe had a month-on-month inflation of ~80Billion %.
hankchinaski 3y ago
I spent 4 weeks in Argentina and you can perfectly pay with Mastercard or visa and get the unofficial tourist fx rate. Everybody accepts card.
3x35r22m4u 3y ago
"In Brazil, there is a frequent rhetoric about “we don’t want to become like Argentina” or “this politician will turn us into Argentina”. So I was left wondering: how bad is it over there really?" In the 80s Brazil, there was a TV ad from Orloff vodka[1] where the guy talked to future-himself. The catchphrase was "Who are you?" "I'm you, but tomorrow". That was it. Every news outlet started using the term "Orloff effect" to scare viewers and readers about brazilian government policies that would, in their opinion, inevitably make Brazil become an Argentina. 1. https://youtu.be/r5-Tsp1nLJU https://youtu.be/r5-Tsp1nLJU
nojvek 3y ago
May get downvoted. The author talks about the people being very friendly. If the author is white, that is a very different experience than if you’re a person of color. Hollywood gives tall while people a special perception in places that don’t have white folks. You could be super wealthy and black, and most countries would still treat you as a poor African. The biases based on color are very real.

84 points by yakkomajuri 3y ago

I submitted a transcript from Javier Milei's address at the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, which I think explains a bit about what is happening, and what is about to happen, from the eyes of the newly elected president who has pretty strong and "out of the ordinary" opinions and ideas. It got some upvotes, but sadly no discussions at all. Highly relevant when discussing Argentina at the moment though, but keep in mind this is just one extreme perspective, one side of the coin so to say: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39436291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39436291 (https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/javiermileiworldeconomicforum54.htm https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/javiermileiworldec...)

robertlagrant 3y ago
I don't think it's that extreme of a perspective. I'm surprised that the perspective he's speaking against, which when implemented reliably causes citizen impoverishment and death should be spoken about more in those terms, I think.
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  Exactly! We are driving our future off a cliff by allowing collectivism to return over libertarianism. For example his perspective would be very consistent with the perspectives of the founding fathers of the United States. The Founding Fathers would have widely agreed with the speech’s support for free-market capitalism and its critique of collectivism, socialism, and excessive state intervention. Advocating principles that promote economic freedom and prosperity would resonate with them as a reflection of their own efforts to create a government that promotes individual liberty and economic opportunity. celebration of the entrepreneur as a hero of prosperity and its warning against state overreach would likely find broad support among the Founding Fathers. They were, after all, establishing a new nation built on principles of liberty, property rights, and opposition to tyranny. The speech’s call for economic freedom and limited government intervention mirrors the Founding Fathers’ debates on the proper role and size of government. Many of the Founding Fathers, like Alexander Hamilton, would likely support the speech’s endorsement of free-market capitalism. The emphasis on economic freedom and the role of free enterprise in lifting people out of poverty would resonate with his and similar Founders’ views on economic development. Yet somehow this is generally considered the majority opinion today of his speech: > has pretty strong and "out of the ordinary" opinions and ideas
  - slibhb 3y ago
    That whole debate wouldn't have made sense to the founding fathers. Yes they were liberals, but "capitalism" wasn't coined until the 19th century. Milei is quite extreme when he claims that markets can't fail. He's trying to move Argentina in the right direction. I would have voted for him. But that's an extreme claim and is rejected by most economists.
    - alchemist1e9 3y ago
      I respectfully disagree in that perhaps some vocabulary would need altering to use words they were more familiar with, but free markets and free enterprise, along with property rights and low taxation was exactly their founding perspective. Regarding “most economists” it would depend on how broad you allow the claim of being an economist is a valid one. We have literal socialist and marxists claiming to be economists. That’s as absurd as creationists claiming to be evolutionarily biologists. Those are perspectives that are empirically proven to be rubbish yet due to human instinctual biases persist for long periods of time. Eventually collectivism, socialism, and marxism should be banished to the gutters of history, the only question is how much more pain and suffering will it take before human civilization decides to include proper social and economic science as part of core education curriculum, like evolution is taught in most places today.
      - slibhb 3y ago
        You're ranting about marxists...but the question is whether markets can fail. Milei says no. But there are plenty of examples of markets failing so, if we take that idea seriously, it reduces to something like "free markets have never been tried". What does that remind you of?
        alchemist1e9 3y ago
        Please provide the examples of market failures and I suspect on closer examination you will discover State failure, not market failures.
- notahacker 3y ago
  Perhaps, if you have never been to the West - the object of Milei's criticism - it is possible to believe that it is a world where people are impoverished and dying through evil collectivists providing welfare states. For everyone else, that's a perspective as extreme as his chainsaw stunts. Milei's bark is likely to prove more extreme than his bite, of course. He's already pointedly not abolishing the central bank and quietly mending relations with China.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > where people are impoverished and dying through evil collectivists providing welfare states Your perspective is too non-collectivism skewed. The West is a mish-mash, but it's the bastion of economic liberalism and capitalism. Those are so effective that they can pay for all sorts of social policies without affecting the productivity too much of the people making the money. You should be thinking about the millions starved and killed in China or Russia or now Argentina when you think of the problems of collectivism. Thinking of somewhere like Sweden as a collectivist paradise is wrong - there are plenty of billionaires there. It's easy to pay for "free" stuff when there's plenty to go round, and the plenty is generally not provided by a collectivist state. There are plenty of people who think that eating the rich would pay for everything. They think billionaires actually have yearly billions in cash to pay for social entitlements, rather than one-off ownership of valuable companies. That's the worry that's being discussed.
    - notahacker 3y ago
      No, my perspective is based on actually reading the actual words of his actual speech which includes lines like "the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism". He explicitly isn't saying anything about the Holodomor or the Great Leap Forward, and he is criticising the leaders of the United States, the EU, the UK and Sweden for being too "collectivist" (and suggesting that neoclassical economics is insufficiently supportive of capitalism because it concedes market distribution might not always be perfect!) The world doesn't lack defences of capitalism or criticisms of the USSR and Latin American socialism, nuanced and otherwise. But the perspective of equating the policy stance of the Biden or Macron or Sunak administration on welfare and regulation with Stalinism or Maoism or even Chavismo is the definition of extremism, and not even high-quality, evidence-based extremism.
larodi 3y ago
Interestingly Cowen and Tabarrok follow this topic closely on Marginal Revolution. also some interesting insights in the comments section there, which is mostly economics-oriented. https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=Argentina https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=Argentina (advise: skip all other random talk about AI, LLMs and ML stuff, you may easily get outraged)
kragen 3y ago
thanks, this is great
gausswho 3y ago
This speech has no legs to stand on. His key premise conflates the industrial revolution with a special definition of capitalism. Which for his ideology has perfect price discovery and a world where no large corporations collude with other. His main course is your usual slab of blaming socialism, sprinkled with side blame at feminists and environmentalists. I don't see anything worth reading here. It is deceptive with intent and fundamentally unhinged.
- diggan 3y ago
  I don't necessarily agree or disagree with Milei, I think my understand of the space and the country is too low to be able to do so. But I disagree with "I don't see anything worth reading here", even if it's unhinged and you fundamentally disagree with their point of view. He is the democratically elected president of a country in despair, and trying to understand what will happen to the country requires understanding the motivations behind the actions, which are laid bare in his speech, no matter how factual his points are.
  - gausswho 3y ago
    I half agree. It is helpful up to a point to know what demogogues might be hatching. But I don't agree that his words describe the actual sources of Argentine despair, even among those who voted for him.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> I think explains a bit about what is happening, and what is about to happen There is a lot of distance between promising economic changes and getting a positive outcome. His path seems to include a lot of reducing income to the government, privatization of government services and shuttering government branches that promote sciences, etc. I think he wants to recreate Alabama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Javier_Milei#Social_views https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Javier_...
- ImJamal 3y ago
  I'm sure a lot of Argentinians would love to live in a place as stable and prosperous as Alabama.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    I'd agree that Alabama can't thwart all of the prosperity it gains from being one of the weakest components of the largest economy in history. Without that massive, continuous boost, it seems difficult to imagine AL rising to even the worst assumptions of Argentina.
    - ImJamal 3y ago
      Compare the inflation rates between Alabama and Argentina. Alabama is significantly better. Compare the GDP per capita. Oh that is right, Alabama is better. Is there any spot where Argentina is more stable or prosperous than Alabama?
      - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        Sure. Because even as the ~weakest part of the US, it's still part of the US and gets to ride that tide. Fully severed and deprived of any US privilege, it's leadership could quickly face any number of newsworthy options like mass die offs due to minimal health care and low vaccination rates, being overthrown by a Latin / South American interest or dying in a bloody coup because they couldn't muster enough resources to complete their 10000 Sweltering Gulags plan fast enough.

tomrod 3y ago

Sounds like a lot of arbitrage for the patient.

pjc50 3y ago
This activity is in the "illegal but overlooked almost everywhere" category, so as soon as you start making significant money out of it you'll hit problems.

ricotico060 3y ago

Argentina has been like this for a very long time. I studied abroad there in 2019 and it was exactly the same. I believe one of the reasons Brian Armstrong started Coinbase was because he saw how devastating inflation was to Argentina’s economy. Argentina was at one point a top 20 country in the world wealth wise and has obviously gone very down hill. It’s too bad, a lot of talented tech workers there.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Argentina didn't really go down hill. Constant GDP per capita is up ~50% from 1960: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDARG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDARG The GDP of the rest of the world went up a lot more than that [1] - and Argentina never did anything besides have decent weather and a roughly constant amount of fertile land. It's kind of like a Dutch Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=eMGt https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=eMGt
- thriftwy 3y ago
  People didn't really need smartphones, laptops and even personal cars in 1960s in Argentine. I believe they generated that GDP while being mostly rural, where it translates to a lot of amenities. Now they would usually be cramped in a city where the effective cost of living is much greater (leading to villas), whereas their GDP and thus income didn't grow much.
  - Wytwwww 3y ago
    70-80%+ of the population was already living in urban areas in the 60s though.
    - thriftwy 3y ago
      Perhaps we've spotted a case for sloggy Argentinean growth, since the country doesn't strike me as being an industrial giant or a R&D hub - what would they all do living in urban areas?

verticalscaler 3y ago

“To give you have an idea, within the first 2 days in Argentina, I dealt with over five different rates. A restaurant actually offered me the proper blue rate (1100) to pay for the bill, whereas one cueva (informal exchange house) offered me 1050 and another 1070. The kiosk where I bought a SIM card from had it at 1060, and Uber, who did the currency conversion themselves rather than leaving it up to my credit card, did it at 1000.” Ah, no. You do the cambio in downtown Buenos Aires once for the whole trip. Random restaurants offering you different rates or inflating your bill is simply people trying to take advantage of a foreigner.

nottorp 3y ago
There's that thing about the largest bill being 2000 pesos atm, and even that being rare. You might need a bag to carry cash for the whole trip, and it will attract the wrong kind of attention?
- bitdivision 3y ago
  This is very accurate. Normally western union will give you notes of 1000 pesos, which is just about manageable in pockets if you're getting a few hundred dollars. I had one instance where there was only one western union I could use (because of the weekend) and they only had 100 and 200 peso notes. I walked out with 300 dollars worth of notes in a black bin bag and hurriedly tried to find a taxi before anyone noticed...
broken_clock 3y ago
I am told as of last year, if you pay for things with Visa or Mastercard credit, they give you the blue dollar rate as well.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tiborsaas 3y ago
Exactly, EUR/HUF rates would be infuriating in Hungary if I wanted to pay with EUR in restaurants.

kingofthehill98 3y ago

They elected a freakin' maniac and they're gonna pay a heavy price for that. In Brazil we have a saying "pior que tá não fica", which translates to something like "it cannot get worse than this". Belive me when I say this: it can (and probably will) get worse. It can (and probably will) get SO MUCH worse. We tasted this poison with 4 years of Bolsonaro trying to get away from the establishment. What did we get in return? 700k brazilians died to COVID, we now have a huge anti-vax problem and after the piece of shit lost the election he attempted a COUP. Luckily he's going to jail on the next few months, but the damage is done.

friend_and_foe 3y ago
Did you read the article?
luzojeda 3y ago
The alternative was the economy minister largely responsible of how we got to where we are now. Minister of a president who basically said "you know what I'm out" in 2022 and basically gave the government to said minister.
- alkonaut 3y ago
  > The alternative was the economy minister largely responsible of how we got to where we are now. That's the problem though. It's completely understandable to vote against that. But to have one option to the status quo, and that option is this? It's basically like you have lived beyond your means for a long while and you live in a too big house and the sensible solution might be to get another job, sell the car and move to a smaller place. But see that choice doesn't exist. Your choice is to keep aggregating debt, OR you burn the house down and live in a tent. The problem with very bitter medicine like this is that it risks swinging back the other way just as fast when people become angry enough.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
swarnie 3y ago

ajot 3y ago

So, a regular Tuesday in Argentina. You grow insensitized to it through the years. Last time I got surprised (and laughed hard at the evil genius) was when last administration kept the conversion rate artificially low, but created a tax for buying dollars for saving. > Just please let’s do better lunches than milanesa con papas next time, deal? Science hasn't made that breakthrough yet :)

7thaccount 3y ago

For those not keeping up with the news, Argentina used to be an extremely wealthy country, but went the reverse route many decades ago and has embraced peronism for awhile (kind of a mixture of socialism and fascism) that has led to rampant inflation. They recently elected Javier Milei (an economist and former sex guru) who although some media claim is a radical rightwing candidate, center-right Libertarian might be more descriptive. He essentially wants to radically reduce government's role and put the country through (economic shock therapy) in the short term so they can have a chance of making a turn around. He has fired a huge amount of government staff he calls the "parasitic class" and I think they just recently actually balanced the budget for the first time in a decade. We'll see how things go. He's trying to get the country on the dollar and off the peso, so they'd just have to deal with the more sensible American inflation rate. It also makes some sense as everyone wants to use the dollar anyway and are basically doing it illegally. He is also removing a lot of government red tape for businesses. He recently flew to Davos and basically told off those in attendance. Some of the things he says I agree with, but many others not so much. He seems to take a lot of Austrian economics views and if you're not familiar with this, it is essentially the ideology that folks like Ron Paul and a lot of the libertarian think tanks (e.g. Cato institute) proclaim. He said a lot of things that are counter to basic economics like "market failures don't exist". I think he believes that given no regulations, things would always sort themselves out, but zero regulations brings about another kind of hell IMO. He also pulled Argentina out of the BRICS negotiations (kind of a very loose federation of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as he didn't want to get involved with communists. Only time will tell if this will be a huge failure or just what the country needs.

ramblerman 3y ago
I think this is a pretty fair assessment of Milei. Do you feel the sex guru part adds much though? Maybe he is in an open relationship, or actually gay, or xyz... does it matter in his economic reform plans for Argentina?
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  He isn't a lifelong politician, so when the media describes him, they refer to his career in the private sector which as far as I'm aware includes two jobs. One was as an economist and the other as a "sex guru" of some kind. I have no idea what all that involved (mainly been following the economic reforms). If he had been an electrician beforehand they would have said economist and electrician. Some may try to use it to try to throw shade i suppose. I was using it in the sense of being complete.

bitdivision 3y ago

I was there a few months ago. For me (without dollars), the best way to get cash was to western union it to myself. They tend to have rates at or around the dollar blue rate. The only painful part of this is that if you send yourself more than around $100 you're going to have to try various western union shops before finding one with enough cash. The other thing to note is that Mastercard (and Visa I believe) have a newer rate specifically aimed at tourists (the MEP rate), which normally stays closer to the informal rate (blue dollar rate). Annoyingly they tend to charge your account with the official rate, and then refund the difference a few days later. There's also this website which has a view of all the different rates: https://bluedollar.net/ https://bluedollar.net/

impostervt 3y ago
I did this with my sister who was digital nomading in Argentina a few months ago. The easiest thing we found was for me to send her $3k via western union, which converted into an ungodly amount of pesos she picked up down there. It was super sketchy. When I sent the money, the western union person said there was a chance western union would block it because it was such a large amount, but luckily it went through. When my sister picked it up, they basically stuffed it into a backpack to carry around. Seemed very dangerous to be carrying that much cash (even in the US it would be), but it worked out ok.
- bitdivision 3y ago
  Yep, western union do tend to have a long kyc check after your first transfer I think. Which can delay things a few days. But after that I never really had a problem. I never heard of anyone getting their transaction completely blocked though.

Havoc 3y ago

Once financial systems collapse a lot of things stop making any sort of sense. Behaviours and incentives change. You saw the same in Zim

rwmj 3y ago
I visited the Soviet Union right at the tail end, and it sounds similar. Official exchange rate (4 rubles to the dollar), street exchange rate (12+ rubles), a mix of shops and restaurants taking dollars unofficially, and people were generally ... fine with it? The economy obviously wasn't working, but everyone was housed, fed and clothed.
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  The ruble was not convertible to foreign currencies prior to that though. If you lived there you could only exchange it for dollars/marks/etc. if you were travelling and only a very limited amount (and of course only well-connected people were allowed to do that anyway). Besides international trade which was fully controlled by the state the USSR wasn't a part of the global financial system. The ruble was more like a token or a scrip (with very limited uses) rather than a real currency. Which is why the state managed to keep a lid on stuff there, there was almost no way for goods/money/people to get in or out at any significant scale.
- moltar 3y ago
  I remember that time. The prices were often set in “UE” (uslovniye edinitsi) translated as “conventional units”, which were of course understood by everyone to be USD. Because using any non-ruble currency for official purposes was illegal.
beAbU 3y ago
Zim's inflation was several orders of magnitude worse than this though.

ekvintroj 3y ago

It’s the shock doctrine again.

pjc50 3y ago
Argentina has been both badly treated by the international financial system AND completely failed to fix their own problems. After agricultural export collapsed mid-century they've failed to develop better export industries except a bit of tourism.
- is_true 3y ago
  We have two problems: corruption and some organizations pushing against us. https://www.greenpeace.org/argentina/campanas-ganadas/ https://www.greenpeace.org/argentina/campanas-ganadas/ Greenpeace helped ban salmon farming. They also tried to stop offshore oil exploration, they just delayed it. This is the kind of things we cannot accept
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Blaming leftists and outsiders for all your problems is probably a core part of why Argentina remains unable to fix itself.
    - is_true 3y ago
      You should read the comment again. You missed a keyword.

kragen 3y ago

this is a pretty good post if you're interested in what the fuck is going on in argentina, you might try git clone http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git and read milei-diary.md, which are my observations here on the ground, after having lived here most of my adult life. it's been a few weeks since i added an entry to it, but i'll update it again soon one minor problem with the post: 'the white rate' is a phrase this blogger made up; if you talk to people about 'the white rate' or 'el dólar blanco' or 'el tipo de cambio blanco' nobody will have any idea what you're talking about

nmeofthestate 3y ago
I'm not going to clone a git repo to read a file, but I did waste some time clicking around your site trying to find this file that you mentioned, to no avail. Just FYI.
- kragen 3y ago
  yeah, as far as i know, it's only available by git cloning. it doesn't benefit me if you read it, just you, so it's fine with me if you don't read it. i'm only mentioning it for the sake of the people who would find it interesting i mean, in theory, you could do this in Python >>> print(zlib.decompress(urlopen( 'http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git/objects/03/220089fdc6713fc459ac71da35d6c8abb5b110' ).read()).decode('utf-8')) but it's easier to just clone the repo reading the file is going to take you an hour or two, so if spending an extra thirty seconds to clone the repo is a significant cost in this context, you probably shouldn't start
  - nmeofthestate 3y ago
    OK - I wont bother. Just letting you know, as you were downvoted a bunch when I commented.
4gotunameagain 3y ago
Beware, exploits have been found in the past where cloning a repo allows remote code execution.

JojoFatsani 3y ago

[flagged]

gruez 3y ago
Wouldn't that be something like Somalia? There's very evidently a state in Argentina, even though it's massively mismanaged.
cbeach 3y ago
Actually the Government has been Peronist (which many consider to be equivalent to socialist) in Argentina from WW2 to 1970, and then from 1989 onwards. A large government spending lots of money. Add in wage and price controls (classic authoritarian leftwing policies), and economic ruin was an inevitability Inflation has nothing to do with libertarianism and everything to do with a state that tried to run everything and inevitably failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_Argentina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_Argentina
- kragen 3y ago
  you are incorrectly conflating socialism with peronism, which is more fascist than socialist, though it certainly has socialist factions within it
  - cbeach 3y ago
    Peronism is relevant, but its an unhelpful term, as its meaning has mutated over the year with different "Peronist" leaders. But fundamentally (if you look at the twenty tenets of Peronism) it is a populist leftwing ideology that aligns strongly with trade unions, social justice and economic nationalism. We can argue the toss as to whether this implies it is "socialist" or not, but it's certainly far from free market capitalism.
    - kragen 3y ago
      yes, it is certainly about as far as you can get from free-market capitalism, but not in the same direction as socialism what you said was, 'Actually the Government has been socialist in Argentina from WW2 to 1970, and then from 1989 onwards', when in fact the numerous socialist parties in argentina have held the presidency or a majority in congress for a sum total of exactly zero days during that time clearly what you're referring to there is peronism, not socialism, and you're also unaware of the administrations of frondizi and the various military dictatorships before 01970

luzojeda 3y ago

>And Argentinians, thank you and best of luck. Just please let’s do better lunches than milanesa con papas next time, deal? Milanesas are a godsend tbh though

yakkomajuri 3y ago
Knew this would be a bit of a contentious point! Have you seen how we do lunches in Brazil though? (search for images about 'self service brasil' for instance)
- is_true 3y ago
  Milanesa is about simplicity. Search "milanesa napolitana a caballo". But to be honest: empanadas > milanesas
  - yakkomajuri 3y ago
    Note: I actually like milanesas quite a bit. Just struggled with the fact that lunch was either grabbing a few empanadas or milanesa con papas :D would have loved a bit more diversity!
- luzojeda 3y ago
  Damn, they look amazing, planning to visit our neighbours soon, will be sure to find a place with something like that. I think we are simpler fellows regarding food but we enjoy them a lot :P

pjc50 3y ago

Some background: https://www.ft.com/content/09e9e924-5ba9-11e9-9dde-7aedca0a081a https://www.ft.com/content/09e9e924-5ba9-11e9-9dde-7aedca0a0... "Argentina’s foreign exchange regime is broken" and https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557753649/ch011.xml https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557753649/ch01... "Multiple Exchange Rate Systems: The Case of Argentina" Fixed exchange rates are effectively an import subsidy. This staves off the problems of massive price spikes in things like petrol and medicines, but devalues the (already struggling) exports. At least Argentina is self-sufficient in food.

thriftwy 3y ago

The current blue rate is 1100 but it was 13 when we visited Argentine 10 years ago. Back then, 100 peso bank note was actually quite convenient. Peso lost value hundredfold in a decade. Go figure. The whole country has left a disorganized feel back then, so when we hopped the border over to Chile we felt we're having a vacation in a vacation.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

[flagged]

rcorin 3y ago

Booking.com shows the price in official pesos, thats why she charged 200usd as 160k ars, when you pay domestically. She didnt make you a cut.

marcodiego 3y ago

I've been there in 2011. Wonderful place. At the time Brazil was recovering from the 2008 crises, which was very light for us, and our economy was probably at its top. I had my first job as a programmer and was very well payed compared to locals. I saved all the money to travel there and pay all expenses for me and my girlfriend in about just 4 months; that's how strongly we were economically. At the time 1 Brazilian real was worth 2 Argentinian pesos and 1 USD was worth less than 2 BRL. At the time, Cristina Kirchner had just won elections and BsAs was full of her posters. Being there at the time felt like being in Europe HDI with south american prices; it was that good and cheap. Cities were beautiful, clean, organized, I spent some time in La Plata which seemed designed in simcity, felt much safer than Brazil and although there were already some signs of decadence like some poor people around, it still looked much better than Brazil. Around 2014 Argentina had already entered in crises, and so did Brazil. At my job, a new colleague was from Argentina. I think he was a level-headed liberal, he sometimes talked about something like how the situation there was. By that time, 1 BRL was worth around 4 pesos and 1 USD was worth 2.35 BRL. Two years ago (2022) I talked with a friend. I explained him how in 2011 I could save all the money to travel Argetina in just 4 months, I couldn't do the same now even if I get twice the salary I had at the time: our prices increased a lot and even though at the time 1 BRL was worth more than 30 pesos! Now, here we are in 2024: 1 BRL is worth around 170 pesos, 1 USD is close to 5 BRL. The article says: "We were mostly left with the impression that it wouldn’t be so bad to turn into Argentina after all.", " I felt safer in most places than I do anywhere in Brazil", "I had an incredible time in Argentina. The country is absolutely stunning, and the people are also fantastic.". Actually it is not Brazil who may turn into Argentina, but Argentina which is turning into Brazil after a long effort to keep social indexes high... artificially or not. We in Brazil also had our own hyper-inflation period. It happened during the 80's. Prices were so volatile that my father bought things and wrote in boxes what the price was in liters of gasoline, so he could have an idea of how much it had really cost. We took a long time to reach stability, from the 90's to early 2000's, but we got there and I hope Argentina will be able to do the same. Although Brazil and Argentina are seen as rivals, I really love that country and people and wish them the best.

Urahandystar 3y ago
Is it true the Brazil Real is named after that currency crisis. Meaning the real rate of the currency or just urban legend?

koolba 3y ago

> It also didn’t just stop there. January saw a 20% inflation rate, meaning from the day we crossed the border from Uruguay to Argentina to the day we crossed the border back to Brazil, about a month later, prices were about 20% higher. That’s not a 20% inflation rate. It’s a monthly amount. That’s a 1.2^12 - 1 = 791.60% inflation rate.

rglullis 3y ago
"inflation rate" does not necessarily means annual rate, so it will depend on the context. For those that never lived through hyperinflation, they rarely see it discussed in terms of month-over-month comparison, but someone in Argentina, Venezuela or 80/90s Brazil would just assume that "20% inflation" means "monthly".
- koolba 3y ago
  Unless otherwise specified, rates are assumed to be annualized. That’s standard for everything from mortgages to inflation as it allows for an apples to apples comparison. My point with showing the annualized calculation was so that those of us in the rest of the world, the majority of people on this site, could better grasp the severity of the problem. In the USA we’ve had about 20% inflation in consumer goods (or at least according to CPI) in the past three years and it’s been a hot topic. The Argentina numbers are staggering.
- beAbU 3y ago
  Not sure if I'll call this hyper inflation though? At it's peak, Zimbabwe had a month-on-month inflation of ~80Billion %.

hankchinaski 3y ago

I spent 4 weeks in Argentina and you can perfectly pay with Mastercard or visa and get the unofficial tourist fx rate. Everybody accepts card.

3x35r22m4u 3y ago

"In Brazil, there is a frequent rhetoric about “we don’t want to become like Argentina” or “this politician will turn us into Argentina”. So I was left wondering: how bad is it over there really?" In the 80s Brazil, there was a TV ad from Orloff vodka[1] where the guy talked to future-himself. The catchphrase was "Who are you?" "I'm you, but tomorrow". That was it. Every news outlet started using the term "Orloff effect" to scare viewers and readers about brazilian government policies that would, in their opinion, inevitably make Brazil become an Argentina. 1. https://youtu.be/r5-Tsp1nLJU https://youtu.be/r5-Tsp1nLJU

nojvek 3y ago

May get downvoted. The author talks about the people being very friendly. If the author is white, that is a very different experience than if you’re a person of color. Hollywood gives tall while people a special perception in places that don’t have white folks. You could be super wealthy and black, and most countries would still treat you as a poor African. The biases based on color are very real.