7 ms·

Argentina restricts online shopping as foreign reserves drop

89 points by ytNumbers 13y ago

ye 13y ago
Argentina is now the primary candidate for Bitcoin adoption. High GDP. Crazy inflation. Corrupt stupid government. Totalitarian-style financial laws. Easy widespread internet and mobile access. Not enough dollars.
- wslh 13y ago
  No, [We] Argentinians follow the dollar religiously. Don't try to give rational arguments in favor or against bitcoins it doesn't work here.
  - fennecfoxen 13y ago
    Eh. Bitcoin won't solve Argentina's foreign-exchange woes anyway. Their fundamental problem is the nation is poor, but the government wants to declare that they're not poor by fiat (printing money, and pretending that the currency hasn't devalued by making it illegal to trade it at a decent price.) Bitcoin won't make the country prosperous any more than black-market dollars will.
    - ye 13y ago
      Bitcoin, assuming I'd does as well as before, can help against the inflation, which hits the poor disproportionately hard. And it allows to bypass the stupid laws and let's you do the online shopping almost anonymously.
      - wslh 13y ago
        No, no, no. You can't buy non virtual stuff anonymously because "everything" is stopped by customs and you need to pick it up personally with your id. You can buy virtual stuff like books, software, etc. Also with bitcoins one day you will pay X and the other X/2 or 2*X.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  Can you explain how a large amount of bitcoin end up getting sold into Argentina? I don't see why anybody (in country) with dollars would bother selling them for bitcoin, and I don't see why anybody with bitcoin is going to be excited about pesos. So you get a little trickle.
  - gojomo 13y ago
    Whatever people are doing to get the pesos, they can do directly for bitcoin instead.
    - zfran 13y ago
      who's gonna pay in bitcoin when they can do it in shitty soon-to-devaluate pesos?
      - gojomo 13y ago
        Who's going to take pesos when someone else is offering bitcoin?
        wslh 13y ago
        You have dollars and Argentinians love dollars. You can buy and sell dolars in the [not so] black market.
        fancyketchup 13y ago
        Who's going to offer bitcoin? Nobody living in Argentina has any to offer. American and European tourists? Why wouldn't they keep their (appreciating) bitcoins at home and just offer to pay in Dollars or Euros?
        politician 13y ago
        They can bootstrap a Bitcoin-variant on a new block chain, and have plenty and plenty which are calibrated to the local economy rather than the Western economy. Remember, money doesn't have intrinsic value. There's no reason a bunch of pissed off middle class educated people can't en masse adopt a new way of trading resources.
- exit 13y ago
  so the problem isn't an imbalance of imports (sending foreign currency out) vs exports (bringing foreign currency in)?
  - fennecfoxen 13y ago
    It is, and the underlying problem is that people don't want to bring dollars to Argentina. Why not? Well, because it's illegal to buy pesos with dollars at a fair price; you must accept a really crappy exchange rate or go to the black market. You can see why few would bring dollars to the country under those conditions. Currency controls like this are the hallmark of a corrupt regime trying their best to pretend there isn't any problem with printing a whole lot of money.
    - erichocean 13y ago
      Currency controls like this are the hallmark of a corrupt regime trying their best to pretend there isn't any problem with printing a whole lot of money. Maybe they've been listening to former Enron advisor and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman over at the NY Times. He's adamant that nothing bad can come from "printing a whole lot of money", and that it's just the ticket to get a problem economy going again—the more the better.
      - wslh 13y ago
        Paul Krugman is a great friend of Argentina[1] but he lives in US. [1] Paul Krugman's Very Strange Ideas About Argentina's Economy: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/04/paul-krugmans-very-strange-ideas-about-argentinas-economy/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/04/paul-krug...
        trevelyan 13y ago
        What are you talking about? This is what Krugman actually had to say about Argentina in 2001: "Argentina entered the new century in straits similar to those of a disquieting number of European counties today. With the peso shackled to the dollar, it had (as Greece, Spain, and the other so-called PIIGS on the periphery of the Eurozone do today) what appeared to be an irremediably overvalued currency sapping the competitiveness of its exports, along with mounting difficulties servicing its debt as tax receipts dwindled in the face of recession. The counsel of the IMF was naturally for austerity. The Argentines should maintain dollar convertibility—that is, a pricey currency—and trim public expenditure in order to cover interest payments. . . . [Yet] austerity in the face of gigantic indebtedness . . . yielded precisely the devaluation and default it was supposed to prevent. If the Argentine experience is truly as exemplary as the IMF once maintained, the story can’t be a heartening one in light of the turn toward austerity today being undertaken in Europe and threatened in the US." In contrast, the Forbes article is entirely unclear. It fails to explain the key point that the IMF was not just advocating depreciation, but was pushing for the sort of restrictive government austerity that has been forced on Greece. "it’s also difficult to see quite what is unorthodox or heterodox about following the standard IMF prescription for a country in such problems. Default, renegotiate the debt burden and devalue the currency to try and spark an export boom." Krugman's point is simple and stands. A simple comparison of Argentina's GDP growth post-2001 with Greek growth post-2008 shows this plainly enough: one economy recovered quickly and the other is still sinking.
- michaelbuckbee 13y ago
  I have an actual real-life case study that supports this. I know someone who is currently outsourcing development to Argentina (close time zone, technical population and he gets to practice his spanish). His current method of paying them is to pay a US residing relative of theirs who is basically holding the money as a stateside retirement account for the Argentinians. He offered over a year ago to start paying them in BTC so that they could actually spend they money he was paying them (for which I'm sure they are kicking themselves for turning down now). So while there are all sorts of issues with BTC in terms of liquidity, exchange and security its probably a mark of how bad it is in Argentina that BTC looks sane and stable in comparison.
  - wslh 13y ago
    One of the simple ways to solve the payment issue is to open an LLC in USA, receive the payments in a US bank account and transfer the money via a "cueva" (cave). There are legal ways also, you can find the details in the Globant's SEC filling: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1557860/000114420413048053/v350224_f1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1557860/000114420413... In that way you can buy and sell dollars using the black market currency in a legal way.
    - rahimnathwani 13y ago
      tl;dr Buy USD-denominated Argentine government bonds in the USA (or have your customer do that). Sell the bonds in Argentina, getting more pesos than you would have through the normal mechanism.
- rtpg 13y ago
  despite all that inflation bitcoin's volatility is a lot higher.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    Not so much in the past few weeks. After the China news stories the price has been pretty stable.
  - martinvol 13y ago
    Actually no, today the peso was devalued by 3% compared to the US dollar. In just one day. And bitcoins can easily be exchanged by US dollars, so is not a bad a idea for Argentinians after all.
- Argorak 13y ago
  Unsurprisingly, there is high interest in Argentina for Bitcoin. The latin american bitcoin conference was in Buenos Aires and there is a foundation. http://labitconf.com/ http://labitconf.com/ http://www.bitcoinargentina.org/ http://www.bitcoinargentina.org/ A lot of argentinian hackers I spoke to are very well-informed about bitcoin.
JVIDEL 13y ago
What happens with the Argentine economy is that everybody who actually kept it afloat (not the corrupt politicians, crony CKD assemblers passing as "industry" or the masses of unskilled and unemployable public employees who can make or break an election) just plain gave up This is very difficult to explain to people in developed countries, but what you have to understand first and foremost is that in Argentina there is no "plan" at all, is a country in a permanent state of improvisation, and because of that you have things like this which are literally implemented overnight with no warning let alone debating about it, you know like democracies are supposed to do... Because of crap like this many Argentines give up and either live off savings or just leave. And really, with an effective tax-rate of over 60% with virtually no rebates and a VAT/sales tax in the mid 20s you reach a point where your income no matter what you do is lower than your expenses, so why keep going? you are actually acquiring DEBT in order to WORK. The current dolar reserve crisis is being handled in such a stupid sloppy manner that is difficult to explain, because it makes no sense whatsoever. For example the government wont let you buy or sell any foreign currency, but it subsidizes every operation in foreign currency at between 40% and 50% lower than real value. The excuse is to avoid an inflationary spiral but it actually created one, and destroyed the reserves of the central bank.
- nickff 13y ago
  I could not agree with you more, but I do have a simple explanation for the currency exchange regulations. The government is taxing exports by underpaying exporters for their goods, while collecting market prices from the foreign customers. The government achieves this by overstating the value of the Argentinian peso, which the exporters are forced to accept as payment (at government dictated exchange rates). This would be a problem if the government allowed citizens to purchase USD at the artificial (low cost per USD in pesos) price, so the government restricts USD purchases in Argentina. The Chinese government implemented this policy before Argentina, which is why they are always accused of manipulating their exchange rates.
  - wslh 13y ago
    There are a lot of differences with China. For example, China produces a lot of goods locally where Argentina "can't" produce a reliable refrigerator... and depends on a lot of foreign components in every industry. Argentina, obviously, produces some high quality goods but in another scale.
itchitawa 13y ago
After a century of failing to manage its economy, Argentina continues to fail to manage its economy. In other news, water is wet.
Daishiman 13y ago
Yeap, holy shit did I pick a good time to leave.
kfk 13y ago
It’s good to point out that a G8 country like Italy is going about the same way as Argentina. Those 2 countries are extremely connected, Argentina’s Italian descends today might be as much as 60% of the whole population. As Italian, I am not trying to stick yet another stereotype to us, but this is an interesting fact after all and it says a lot about the future of Italy too if you ask me. edit O yeah, and Europe too, it says a lot about the future of Europe too
hrnnnnnn 13y ago
This is pretty much how it's been in Iceland for several years now.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  The main difference is that Iceland has so far not made territorial claims on Greenland to try and distract its population from their miserable situation.
bevacqua 13y ago
I live in Argentina and _I bought pesos at 11.665_ on the dollar yesterday. Today it's closing in on the 12 mark, at 11.85. Lately, the Argentinean peso has been plummeting in value. Yesterday the official peso dropped with a rate that hadn't been seen in 5 years. The government converts USD, if I were to place them in my bank, to the official peso. They don't sell USD, though. So I would never get real USD if I were to use my bank account in Argentina. That currency currently sits at 6.89, over 70% below the real value. Now they're attempting to limit online shopping to, get this, TWICE _per year_. This makes me want to flee the country.
- estebank 13y ago
  I've left the country exactly a year ago. There's no legal way of leaving the country with your savings. You're unable to exchange your savings legally as the only concept that the AFIP (local IRS) accepts for exchanging is exports. I know, I checked every possible avenue. The people you talk to's attitude ranges from apologetic, passing through not-give-a-shit reaching abuse. Luckily for me, I didn't have any big savings, not really, but if you have a house/car/anything (IE, have roots) and you sell it you're royally fucked. Even if you exchange in the black market you cannot leave the country with more than USD 10K per person, and if you do and get caught in either Argentina or destination country, it'll get confiscated in its entirety. And once you've arrived to a country with USD 10K, you have to exchange it to the local currency (let's say EUR). But now you have EUR 7380 in cash that no bank will touch with a 10 foot pole because almost no other country in the world disallows it's citizens from doing bank transfers, so that money is suspected of being laundered. On top of all this, you can use your credit card outside of the country, with a 35% tax to every purchase, with a monthly top, so if you're left with pesos, as I was, you can start chipping away at the meager pesos savings bit by bit. But then you have to keep in mind the incredible inflation rate that the peso has[1][2] of over 28% for 2014[3](3.38% in a month!). [1]: http://imgur.com/va1o1C1 http://imgur.com/va1o1C1 [2]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AuNh4LTzbqXMdFJobGlLMWl2bzR3SHM3Nmc1dExLZmc&output=csv https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AuNh4LTzbqXMdFJ... [3]: http://www.infobae.com/2014/01/14/1537019-la-inflacion-congreso-fue-283-2013-y-la-mas-alta-un-mes-mas-22-anos http://www.infobae.com/2014/01/14/1537019-la-inflacion-congr...
gadders 13y ago
I expect the Falklands will get a mention by their president soon. Normally any time they have an internal problem they try a bit of sabre rattling to distract the population.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  With a bit of luck, they can prove the downfall of two Argentine dictatorships instead of just one.
blueskin_ 13y ago
Argentina keeps resembling a dictatorship / failed state more and more with every passing month.
acd 13y ago
There is no gold in the vaults only useless paper notes backed up by the fraudulent system of fractional reserve banks. Paper notes goes back to their intrinsic value that of paper. Argentina and India will most likely by their history of high inflation be keen to use cryptographic currencies like Bitcoin.
martinvol 13y ago
It's incredibly what the government had done to the economy just in a couple of years. In 2008 we were virtually safe from the world crisis. Then they didn't stop the public spending, so the emitted more and more pesos, which lead to inflation, that they didn't want to admit, so they started fixing the exchange rate with the dollar. Until it was unbelievable cheap, so they started to control it. More and more restrictions went on. So many that they basically destroyed the economy trust, that is pretty much everything in economy. It's incredible that this distortions led to a country with few dollars, expensive for forgings, with no foreign investment. And it's also cheap for Argentines to travel abroad! I have no idea how the hell they did that mess so quickly.

89 points by ytNumbers 13y ago

ye 13y ago

Argentina is now the primary candidate for Bitcoin adoption. High GDP. Crazy inflation. Corrupt stupid government. Totalitarian-style financial laws. Easy widespread internet and mobile access. Not enough dollars.

wslh 13y ago
No, [We] Argentinians follow the dollar religiously. Don't try to give rational arguments in favor or against bitcoins it doesn't work here.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  Eh. Bitcoin won't solve Argentina's foreign-exchange woes anyway. Their fundamental problem is the nation is poor, but the government wants to declare that they're not poor by fiat (printing money, and pretending that the currency hasn't devalued by making it illegal to trade it at a decent price.) Bitcoin won't make the country prosperous any more than black-market dollars will.
  - ye 13y ago
    Bitcoin, assuming I'd does as well as before, can help against the inflation, which hits the poor disproportionately hard. And it allows to bypass the stupid laws and let's you do the online shopping almost anonymously.
    - wslh 13y ago
      No, no, no. You can't buy non virtual stuff anonymously because "everything" is stopped by customs and you need to pick it up personally with your id. You can buy virtual stuff like books, software, etc. Also with bitcoins one day you will pay X and the other X/2 or 2*X.
maxerickson 13y ago
Can you explain how a large amount of bitcoin end up getting sold into Argentina? I don't see why anybody (in country) with dollars would bother selling them for bitcoin, and I don't see why anybody with bitcoin is going to be excited about pesos. So you get a little trickle.
- gojomo 13y ago
  Whatever people are doing to get the pesos, they can do directly for bitcoin instead.
  - zfran 13y ago
    who's gonna pay in bitcoin when they can do it in shitty soon-to-devaluate pesos?
    - gojomo 13y ago
      Who's going to take pesos when someone else is offering bitcoin?
      - wslh 13y ago
        You have dollars and Argentinians love dollars. You can buy and sell dolars in the [not so] black market.
      - fancyketchup 13y ago
        Who's going to offer bitcoin? Nobody living in Argentina has any to offer. American and European tourists? Why wouldn't they keep their (appreciating) bitcoins at home and just offer to pay in Dollars or Euros?
        politician 13y ago
        They can bootstrap a Bitcoin-variant on a new block chain, and have plenty and plenty which are calibrated to the local economy rather than the Western economy. Remember, money doesn't have intrinsic value. There's no reason a bunch of pissed off middle class educated people can't en masse adopt a new way of trading resources.
exit 13y ago
so the problem isn't an imbalance of imports (sending foreign currency out) vs exports (bringing foreign currency in)?
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  It is, and the underlying problem is that people don't want to bring dollars to Argentina. Why not? Well, because it's illegal to buy pesos with dollars at a fair price; you must accept a really crappy exchange rate or go to the black market. You can see why few would bring dollars to the country under those conditions. Currency controls like this are the hallmark of a corrupt regime trying their best to pretend there isn't any problem with printing a whole lot of money.
  - erichocean 13y ago
    Currency controls like this are the hallmark of a corrupt regime trying their best to pretend there isn't any problem with printing a whole lot of money. Maybe they've been listening to former Enron advisor and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman over at the NY Times. He's adamant that nothing bad can come from "printing a whole lot of money", and that it's just the ticket to get a problem economy going again—the more the better.
    - wslh 13y ago
      Paul Krugman is a great friend of Argentina[1] but he lives in US. [1] Paul Krugman's Very Strange Ideas About Argentina's Economy: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/04/paul-krugmans-very-strange-ideas-about-argentinas-economy/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/04/paul-krug...
      - trevelyan 13y ago
        What are you talking about? This is what Krugman actually had to say about Argentina in 2001: "Argentina entered the new century in straits similar to those of a disquieting number of European counties today. With the peso shackled to the dollar, it had (as Greece, Spain, and the other so-called PIIGS on the periphery of the Eurozone do today) what appeared to be an irremediably overvalued currency sapping the competitiveness of its exports, along with mounting difficulties servicing its debt as tax receipts dwindled in the face of recession. The counsel of the IMF was naturally for austerity. The Argentines should maintain dollar convertibility—that is, a pricey currency—and trim public expenditure in order to cover interest payments. . . . [Yet] austerity in the face of gigantic indebtedness . . . yielded precisely the devaluation and default it was supposed to prevent. If the Argentine experience is truly as exemplary as the IMF once maintained, the story can’t be a heartening one in light of the turn toward austerity today being undertaken in Europe and threatened in the US." In contrast, the Forbes article is entirely unclear. It fails to explain the key point that the IMF was not just advocating depreciation, but was pushing for the sort of restrictive government austerity that has been forced on Greece. "it’s also difficult to see quite what is unorthodox or heterodox about following the standard IMF prescription for a country in such problems. Default, renegotiate the debt burden and devalue the currency to try and spark an export boom." Krugman's point is simple and stands. A simple comparison of Argentina's GDP growth post-2001 with Greek growth post-2008 shows this plainly enough: one economy recovered quickly and the other is still sinking.
michaelbuckbee 13y ago
I have an actual real-life case study that supports this. I know someone who is currently outsourcing development to Argentina (close time zone, technical population and he gets to practice his spanish). His current method of paying them is to pay a US residing relative of theirs who is basically holding the money as a stateside retirement account for the Argentinians. He offered over a year ago to start paying them in BTC so that they could actually spend they money he was paying them (for which I'm sure they are kicking themselves for turning down now). So while there are all sorts of issues with BTC in terms of liquidity, exchange and security its probably a mark of how bad it is in Argentina that BTC looks sane and stable in comparison.
- wslh 13y ago
  One of the simple ways to solve the payment issue is to open an LLC in USA, receive the payments in a US bank account and transfer the money via a "cueva" (cave). There are legal ways also, you can find the details in the Globant's SEC filling: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1557860/000114420413048053/v350224_f1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1557860/000114420413... In that way you can buy and sell dollars using the black market currency in a legal way.
  - rahimnathwani 13y ago
    tl;dr Buy USD-denominated Argentine government bonds in the USA (or have your customer do that). Sell the bonds in Argentina, getting more pesos than you would have through the normal mechanism.
rtpg 13y ago
despite all that inflation bitcoin's volatility is a lot higher.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  Not so much in the past few weeks. After the China news stories the price has been pretty stable.
- martinvol 13y ago
  Actually no, today the peso was devalued by 3% compared to the US dollar. In just one day. And bitcoins can easily be exchanged by US dollars, so is not a bad a idea for Argentinians after all.
Argorak 13y ago
Unsurprisingly, there is high interest in Argentina for Bitcoin. The latin american bitcoin conference was in Buenos Aires and there is a foundation. http://labitconf.com/ http://labitconf.com/ http://www.bitcoinargentina.org/ http://www.bitcoinargentina.org/ A lot of argentinian hackers I spoke to are very well-informed about bitcoin.

JVIDEL 13y ago

What happens with the Argentine economy is that everybody who actually kept it afloat (not the corrupt politicians, crony CKD assemblers passing as "industry" or the masses of unskilled and unemployable public employees who can make or break an election) just plain gave up This is very difficult to explain to people in developed countries, but what you have to understand first and foremost is that in Argentina there is no "plan" at all, is a country in a permanent state of improvisation, and because of that you have things like this which are literally implemented overnight with no warning let alone debating about it, you know like democracies are supposed to do... Because of crap like this many Argentines give up and either live off savings or just leave. And really, with an effective tax-rate of over 60% with virtually no rebates and a VAT/sales tax in the mid 20s you reach a point where your income no matter what you do is lower than your expenses, so why keep going? you are actually acquiring DEBT in order to WORK. The current dolar reserve crisis is being handled in such a stupid sloppy manner that is difficult to explain, because it makes no sense whatsoever. For example the government wont let you buy or sell any foreign currency, but it subsidizes every operation in foreign currency at between 40% and 50% lower than real value. The excuse is to avoid an inflationary spiral but it actually created one, and destroyed the reserves of the central bank.

nickff 13y ago
I could not agree with you more, but I do have a simple explanation for the currency exchange regulations. The government is taxing exports by underpaying exporters for their goods, while collecting market prices from the foreign customers. The government achieves this by overstating the value of the Argentinian peso, which the exporters are forced to accept as payment (at government dictated exchange rates). This would be a problem if the government allowed citizens to purchase USD at the artificial (low cost per USD in pesos) price, so the government restricts USD purchases in Argentina. The Chinese government implemented this policy before Argentina, which is why they are always accused of manipulating their exchange rates.
- wslh 13y ago
  There are a lot of differences with China. For example, China produces a lot of goods locally where Argentina "can't" produce a reliable refrigerator... and depends on a lot of foreign components in every industry. Argentina, obviously, produces some high quality goods but in another scale.

itchitawa 13y ago

After a century of failing to manage its economy, Argentina continues to fail to manage its economy. In other news, water is wet.

Daishiman 13y ago

Yeap, holy shit did I pick a good time to leave.

kfk 13y ago

It’s good to point out that a G8 country like Italy is going about the same way as Argentina. Those 2 countries are extremely connected, Argentina’s Italian descends today might be as much as 60% of the whole population. As Italian, I am not trying to stick yet another stereotype to us, but this is an interesting fact after all and it says a lot about the future of Italy too if you ask me. edit O yeah, and Europe too, it says a lot about the future of Europe too

hrnnnnnn 13y ago

This is pretty much how it's been in Iceland for several years now.

blueskin_ 13y ago
The main difference is that Iceland has so far not made territorial claims on Greenland to try and distract its population from their miserable situation.

bevacqua 13y ago

I live in Argentina and _I bought pesos at 11.665_ on the dollar yesterday. Today it's closing in on the 12 mark, at 11.85. Lately, the Argentinean peso has been plummeting in value. Yesterday the official peso dropped with a rate that hadn't been seen in 5 years. The government converts USD, if I were to place them in my bank, to the official peso. They don't sell USD, though. So I would never get real USD if I were to use my bank account in Argentina. That currency currently sits at 6.89, over 70% below the real value. Now they're attempting to limit online shopping to, get this, TWICE _per year_. This makes me want to flee the country.

estebank 13y ago
I've left the country exactly a year ago. There's no legal way of leaving the country with your savings. You're unable to exchange your savings legally as the only concept that the AFIP (local IRS) accepts for exchanging is exports. I know, I checked every possible avenue. The people you talk to's attitude ranges from apologetic, passing through not-give-a-shit reaching abuse. Luckily for me, I didn't have any big savings, not really, but if you have a house/car/anything (IE, have roots) and you sell it you're royally fucked. Even if you exchange in the black market you cannot leave the country with more than USD 10K per person, and if you do and get caught in either Argentina or destination country, it'll get confiscated in its entirety. And once you've arrived to a country with USD 10K, you have to exchange it to the local currency (let's say EUR). But now you have EUR 7380 in cash that no bank will touch with a 10 foot pole because almost no other country in the world disallows it's citizens from doing bank transfers, so that money is suspected of being laundered. On top of all this, you can use your credit card outside of the country, with a 35% tax to every purchase, with a monthly top, so if you're left with pesos, as I was, you can start chipping away at the meager pesos savings bit by bit. But then you have to keep in mind the incredible inflation rate that the peso has[1][2] of over 28% for 2014[3](3.38% in a month!). [1]: http://imgur.com/va1o1C1 http://imgur.com/va1o1C1 [2]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AuNh4LTzbqXMdFJobGlLMWl2bzR3SHM3Nmc1dExLZmc&output=csv https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AuNh4LTzbqXMdFJ... [3]: http://www.infobae.com/2014/01/14/1537019-la-inflacion-congreso-fue-283-2013-y-la-mas-alta-un-mes-mas-22-anos http://www.infobae.com/2014/01/14/1537019-la-inflacion-congr...

gadders 13y ago

I expect the Falklands will get a mention by their president soon. Normally any time they have an internal problem they try a bit of sabre rattling to distract the population.

blueskin_ 13y ago
With a bit of luck, they can prove the downfall of two Argentine dictatorships instead of just one.

blueskin_ 13y ago

Argentina keeps resembling a dictatorship / failed state more and more with every passing month.

acd 13y ago

There is no gold in the vaults only useless paper notes backed up by the fraudulent system of fractional reserve banks. Paper notes goes back to their intrinsic value that of paper. Argentina and India will most likely by their history of high inflation be keen to use cryptographic currencies like Bitcoin.

martinvol 13y ago

It's incredibly what the government had done to the economy just in a couple of years. In 2008 we were virtually safe from the world crisis. Then they didn't stop the public spending, so the emitted more and more pesos, which lead to inflation, that they didn't want to admit, so they started fixing the exchange rate with the dollar. Until it was unbelievable cheap, so they started to control it. More and more restrictions went on. So many that they basically destroyed the economy trust, that is pretty much everything in economy. It's incredible that this distortions led to a country with few dollars, expensive for forgings, with no foreign investment. And it's also cheap for Argentines to travel abroad! I have no idea how the hell they did that mess so quickly.