Paypal Users In Argentina Can No Longer Make Domestic Transactions 272
another random user writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "The online payment service said that from 9 October: 'Argentina resident Paypal-users may only send and receive international payments.'
Last year the Argentine government announced restrictions on the purchase of U.S. dollars.
It has led to an increase in currency sales on the black market — but Paypal's exchange rates are better.
Locals were setting up two accounts under different email addresses and transferring money between the two, exchanging local currency pesos for dollars in the process."
Re:A word to the wise (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. Look at all the people on Wall Street, who went to jail.
Uhm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Transferring money from one of your own accounts to another, within the same country, is "money laundering and tax evasion" now?
"Money laundering and tax evasion" clearly is the "terrorism and cybercriminality" of the financial world, it is.
Re:A word to the wise (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the government of Argentina that is "gaming the system" by artificially increasing the price of dollars. Smart people are realizing that socialist policies are going to bring high inflation as they always do and wipe away people's life savings in the name of social justice .
Re:A word to the wise (Score:5, Insightful)
Game the system, pay the price...
You were referring to the Argentine authorities, right? Price-fixing/rationing has always been a disaster. But it's not just Argentina, the most important price of all--the price of money (interest rates)--is still being fixed all around the world, with nary a peep from people, or indeed economists who should know better.
If people knew what money is and saw what is passed off as "money" these days, there would be a revolution overnight.
Re:Uhm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Argentina is completely screwed up now. There is no logic other than figuring out strange ways for the government to steal. Oddly enough the president has a huge approval rating. It's an Economic Reality Distortion Field.
It's pretty pathetic, because Argentina has tremendous natural resources compared to its population size and an educated population and few internal ethnic problems (they exterminated their natives in the 19th century). And to the north of them, without those advantages, Brazil is leaving them far behind despite having a robust social welfare state.
Source: in-laws in Buenos Aires; reading Economist.
Government fighting the market (Score:5, Insightful)
So people want to be able to buy something, government says: you can't. This always leads to black markets.
Inflation (money printing) in Argentina is high, their prices are going up 24% per year, which is the consequence of high inflation. Instead of stopping the inflation (stopping the money printing), the government wants to stop people from saving their purchasing power, however they do it. Apparently to the people of Argentina USD seem to be more attractive then their own currency.
In USA inflation is also high, 11-15%, but prices are not going up as quickly as in Argentina, because other countries are still willing to absorb the new dollars and exchange their goods for them, so prices are going up in other countries, who respond with their own inflation, they print their own currencies in response to USA printing and they are willing so far to exchange their own productivity (products they manufacture and make) for US dollars. This pushes prices up for those productive nations and this still acts as a price buffer for USA.
But look at this obvious response by government of Argentina: it's not that the government is plainly wrong in what it is doing, destroying the currency of the people.
The government says: it is the people, who are wrong for wanting to save their own savings, their purchasing power. Let's take the purchasing power away from the people. What it means is that the government wants to keep its high levels of spending but cannot or will not raise taxes, so it wants to steal from people. Printing money is theft of productivity and it's most obvious to the people when their prices go up.
Of-course very few people can understand the link between their prices going up and their government printing the currency, it's not a link that is necessarily very obvious directly to people, that's because people are not taught economics and the version of economics that they are taught is really not economics, it's propaganda that allows the government elite to keep people in check by denying them the real understanding of what is going on.
What is happening in Argentina is nothing new. Many countries did the same thing - printed money, set exchange controls, price controls, all it ever does is it creates black markets and very quickly creates very wide separation onto the poor and rich, even among people that maybe didn't have that huge of a separation before the gov't actions.
The newly printed money does not equal wealth. The amount of production stays the same (or it is decreased because people move their savings somewhere else and this means moving production somewhere else, so the country suffers decrease of productivity and increase of money supply), so the new money simply ends up bidding up prices for the existing assets and goods.
This is why inflation (money printing) hurts the poor much more than the wealthy, because the poor live on various fixed incomes, they are getting less and less with every check, be it a salary or a dividend or a pension check, whatever.
The wealthy end up bidding up prices for existing assets. Everything becomes a fight for a fixed or a decreasing pie, the pie is not growing. Only savings and production grows the pie, money printing destroys savings and productivity and re-allocates the pie from middle and poor to the top.
That's why there is a higher and higher wealth disparity, it's not because the 1% is stealing something, it's because the government is stealing something, the government is stealing purchasing power, it's destroying the savings, productivity, it's destroying the currency.
Of-course as people try to avoid their purchasing power from being destroyed by the government, the government sees this as something to be prevented, so it sets exchange controls, currency controls, wage and price controls. Minimum wage is just an attempt to hide levels of inflation, like many other things that gov't does it backfires and creates more unemployment and dependency and decreases productivity and standa
Re:A word to the wise (Score:2, Insightful)
No, the interest rates as such are not fixed. The interest rates you hear from the news which are set is the interest rate which banks pay for money from the central bank (Federal Reserve, ECB etc.). And since it's exactly that institution which also sets that interest rate, its in principle nothing else than if another bank sets the interest rate for money it lends. The reason why in practice it does make a difference is that ultimately all money comes from that single bank (because it has a monopoly on creating the money). Therefore the interest rate that bank sets also affects all the interest rates of the banks, because they won't demand less than they themselves have to pay if they lend you money, nor will they pay more for your money than what they'll get it for from the central bank.
So, no it is no price fixing, but a legally enforced monopoly.
Re:Uhm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if you're poor. If you're transferring funds that are only worth a day's wages, you're "money laundering and tax evading." If you're transferring sums that exceed the total lifetime earnings of an individual in the majority, you're a currency trader, and a respected businessman. Two scenarios gaming the system in exactly the same way. It's called arbitrage, if I'm not mistaken. Do it on small scales, you're a criminal. Do it at large scales, you're a pillar of the community.
Re:A word to the wise (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean Madoff? Or would you like to talk about the mortgage meltdown stuff? Well the mortgage meltdown stuff gets interesting, because if you really want to get into that, the first thing that needs to happen is you go back to where the government forced banks into lending to people who shouldn't have gotten the loans in the first place. And when the banks said "we shouldn't have to..." the government said: "you will loan, or we'll pull your FDIC backing and launch trade and trust investigations against you."
Nothing quite like the government at work right? Might also want to look into which party was heavily involved in all of that too. But let's just say that, when changes were put forward to get it fixed back in 2002, and 2003 the "opposite party in charge" cockblocked the entire thing. Oh...if you didn't figure it out yet, it was the democrats.
Re:Government fighting the market (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it will come eventually. I mean Greece wasn't a problem 2.5 years ago, right? What I mean is that nobody heard of Greece as being a problem 2.5 years ago. All of a sudden it became a problem.
So did the problem happen in a few days? No, of-course not. Greece had the problem of government spending of money that it didn't have (borrowed money) for decades. Greece should never have entered the Euro zone, because Greece was fundamentally screwed up even when Euro zone was being established. Same with many other countries there.
But Greece could keep borrowing with short term papers (ARMs) and it could keep spending money it could never repay. Eventually this became obvious and now there is a depression, which is again, a way for the market to rebalance the equation. A way to allow the scarce resources to be allocated more efficiently. Companies that are inefficient and governments that spend more than they can take in, spend borrowed or stolen money, they must fail so that the credit, the money can be saved and eventually the savings can be used to restart production.
Instead the European union decides it's going to start printing more and more Euros, placing the burden on the people who still produce and pay taxes, be it in Germany or in Switzerland (now, that the Swiss committed economic suicide by hard linking their currency to the Euro). This will not solve the problem for Greece, it will only make the problem bigger for everybody else.
Same thing for USA. Since 1971, when Nixon defaulted on the dollar, the economy has been going down. If you take all sorts of graphs, that compare wealth distribution, compare wages, salaries, purchasing power, manufacturing, government spending, whatever you want, you'll see an interesting thing that happened since about 1971 - there is an edge there, and all these charts show that since then the disparity started growing, the real earning power started going down, the debt started growing much more than before, inflation really took off, all the bad things that eventually do destroy the economy started around that moment.
Of-course to lead to that moment, it took 1913, when the Federal reserve (and IRS) were established in the first place, which allowed for rapid expansion of government.
People don't realize it, but growing government is not a good thing. Government shouldn't be growing all the time, it should do a few things and stay about the same in terms of size and power. A government that is growing all the time signals that the real economy is shrinking all the time and government that is growing is gov't that is getting more powerful, it signals that individual freedoms are shrinking.
That's the combination that eventually destroys the economy, everything. The problem is the government, it's a very lucrative place to be, even if you are very mediocre or just plain stupid. I mean to grow a successful business you have to be productive, you have to work pretty hard, (maybe you have to be luckier than your average guy, but still, it takes a huge effort).
To become wealthy by working for government you have to be cunning, cheating, lying and as unprincipled as possibles - those are the qualities that get rewarded. And those people have the power in their hands. Of-course they'll abuse it for personal gain, what else is new? The problem is that they should never have had that power, they used to be constrained by the law that was set above the government - the Constitution, but they figured out how to get around the law. That's a pretty good explanation as to why so many people in government are lawyers.
Lawyers. Not engineers. Not scientists. Not real business people. Not even just plain folks without anything special about them, who are not lawyers.
I think the next crisis will force the people to review what kind of government they want, what is the function of government, what is the role?
As far as I am concerned, the time of ultra-nationalist ideas must pass, the government shouldn
Re:I'm in Buenos Aires (Score:5, Insightful)
And of course all the Argentine government do if they feel their ratings are slipping is distract the population by bringing up the Falklands again. Then accusing Britain of being "provocative" when Britain increases the defence of the Falklands from all the belligerent talk from the Argentine government.
Whether this works or not to distract the Argentine population or rally them around the current government, I don't know (an article I saw on the Spanish TV news analysis programme, Informe Semanal, seems to suggest it no longer works)
Re:A word to the wise (Score:2, Insightful)
What you mean to say is that the government and the banks supported an industry in which they both feathered each others' nests for as long as it would take them to get obscenely rich.
They're bastards on both sides, and America is the slowest country in the world to realise this.
Re:Government fighting the market (Score:1, Insightful)
Growing government isn't a bad thing, either.
- growing government means shrinking individual freedoms, yes it means something bad.
Go read some of the many studies about psychopaths in executive positions and such.
- without government intervention it doesn't matter who is running companies, companies prosper by giving to the people what people want. Governments grow by stealing from people, businesses grow by giving products and services to people.
Without government power a company cannot become a monopoly, it can strive to be the largest competitor, an economy of scale, but it can only succeed and stay successful as long as it gives people what they want.
All that businesses do is give. Businesses give products and services, businesses give investment opportunities, businesses give jobs to people that pay wages, salaries. It is businesses that create everything that we consume. Without businesses all we are is what we were for millions of years, when everybody was only producing enough for himself - surviving on subsistence.
Some had it better than others, some were hunters, some fished, some were farmers, life was not fun, it was mostly about making everything you need for yourself to survive. Capitalism and free market allowed savings to be applied by businesses upon the labour and land in a way that created productive output, where all the inputs into the business mixed together and properly managed produced something that is greater than the parts that went into it.
The point of running a business is to make yourself wealthier, but to do that without government intervention you have to produce and give.
You sounded ultra-conservative up to that point, but what you describe is a new world order type where people govern locally, but wider policies are made at the global level, which is one of the things the conservatives state is happening and is a bad thing.
- I don't want any global government at all, I think all global government is global corruption.
I don't know if this is 'conservative' or whatever, but I do know that allowing some unproductive people to be the elite and rule all productive people leads to a disaster.