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."
The challenges of a global market (Score:5, Interesting)
Beef (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A word to the wise (Score:3, Interesting)
I seem to remember huge job losses in that industry in the wake of the breaking scandal, so yes - game the system, pay the price. The "price" doesn't always mean incarceration...
Re:Government fighting the market (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I heard someone complaining that the US caused inflation elsewhere. I told him to shut up and complain to an MP. The US didn't "force" them to print money. If everyone else stopped printing money now, then the US economy would fail. The sooner we get through that, the better off the world will be. The US is a massive anchor on the world economy. The problem is so many still think about it as the foundation (which it was, back in the 1960s with the large educated population and no damage to infrastructure. But everyone else passed the US since, and the US is a net drain on the planet. Let US fail and move on. The world will be a better place if they just stopped bending over backwards to keep the US from failing.
I'm in Buenos Aires (Score:5, Interesting)
And you have half of your facts right.
Brazil has very much indeed left us behind. No doubt about that. But they have problems of their own too.
The behavior of the government here can be described as "random" at best, creating policies which have no clear benefit to anyone or purpose other than "someone, somewhere is stealing a lot of money with this... but I don't quite know how". It is very infuriating. They come out with blatant lies all the time, which has made the approval rating drop to what I imagine are single digits now. I say imagine since you can't trust any news outlets. I'd say something about that, but you americans have fox news, so we're relatively tame on that score. At least for now.
It's also sad that what used to be the "good" politicians are the ones now in office, corrupted beyond recognition. They got in basically by not being part of the US-slavish mafia that had been ruling for the last 20 years. But now they made up a mafia of their own, so that's not even a selling point anymore. It's nice that they don't just bow and take it in the ass 24/7 and lay the bill on us, but who cares if they still fuck us over even worse than before in many ways.
The opposing party is pretty much an open mafia, so there is really no other choice. If there were elections today, I couldn't vote honestly for anyone, unless votes were casted with bullets. I would vote for pretty much everybody then. Many times over.
Re:The challenges of a global market (Score:5, Interesting)
"Or, force PayPal to not do currency conversions. In the end, they will either have to give up, massively devalue the Peso or make it a non-convertablke currency."
Or -- far simpler -- just do as they did in the EU and make PayPal register as an actual bank.
Re:Government fighting the market (Score:3, Interesting)
You are the product of the propaganda machine that I am talking about. The real inflation in USA has not been reported since Nixon either, they have changed the way the inflation is counted enough times for it to mean absolutely nothing.
Same with the GDP numbers, they are completely meaningless. It's a number, it means nothing. It's reversed engineered to fit the necessary levels of propaganda. 70% of it consumption, not production. Consumption of imported goods. 40% of economy is financial manipulations, banking, stock market, whatever. Again, that's not production. Maybe 5% of it is all the manufacturing and agriculture that still exists in USA. The rest of it is government spending, military, all sorts of government contracts.
The real GDP in USA has been falling since 1971. There WAS a bump in 1981, that's when Paul Volcker took the interest rates to 21.5%, which was high enough for people to get back into dollars and government debt purchases. Since then it has been falling steadily again. The GDP is supposed to be deflated by the real inflation numbers, and the real inflation numbers are reverse engineered, manufactured by the government for your consumption.
The real inflation numbers in USA vary between 11 and 15% year to year, and you can trace them by looking at a basket of commodity prices going up, precious metals, oil, even food, etc.
Some people still track inflation the way it was calculated before Nixon's time [shadowstats.com].
Re:A word to the wise (Score:5, Interesting)
And how many of those people who lost their jobs were the ones that actually caused the problems? I don't recall seeing the CEOs of any of the banks hurting after their incompetence and hubris led to the crisis.
Re:A word to the wise (Score:5, Interesting)
"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 ."
Like all systems, just as over the top free market capitalism led to the banking collapse, over the top socialism can indebt a country beyond it's means too (Greece).
But what isn't true is that socialist policies in general always inherently bring high inflation. Countries like Canada, Germany, the UK, most the Scandinavian nations and so forth are good examples.
Using one failing country to push your own political ideology is stupid, especially so when there are many other countries succesfully using elements of that ideology you so sternly oppose and claim is doomed to failure.
Re:A word to the wise (Score:3, Interesting)
Fundamentally, forcing an unnatural exchange rate on a fiat currency is not sustainable. I thought maybe the Argentine government had learned their lesson about dorking around with fundamental economic forces after their little hyperinflation fiasco in the second half of the twentieth century, but perhaps they needed to be reminded. You can't fight fundamental economic forces. Well, you can try, but the fight will not go well for you. It's like trying to fight the laws of physics, only your fate arrives slowly and painfully instead of swiftly.
Re:A word to the wise (Score:5, Interesting)
What you mean to say is, the United States of America has been printing money and using it to make purchases from other nations, and those other nations hoard those US dollars and trade them amongst themselves rather than redeeming them for American made goods, so America basically gets a free ride on the back of everyone else and has since the 70s.
It's like if I wrote a cheque and used it to pay for groceries, and the grocer didn't cash it, but paid their power bill with it, and the power company didn't cash it, but paid their employees with it, etc, etc.
But it's going to come to an end soon... China is selling oil for Yuan, and Russia has made an agreement with them to supply them with as much oil and gas as they want.
http://www.examiner.com/article/dollar-no-longer-primary-oil-currency-as-china-begins-to-sell-oil-using-yuan [examiner.com]
So, the era of the USA is at an end, along with the ridiculous culture they've created.
Re:A word to the wise (Score:2, Interesting)
The name "barney frank" comes to mind. He was the driving force behind fannie mae churning out millions of subprime loans in order to "make housing more affordable". All this cheap money had the effect of creating the housing bubble, ironically making housing LESS affordable. Then, of course, the bubble burst and the people left holding the bag on upside down mortgages were the very ones frank was trying to "help". In response, the dems created the "occupy wall street" movement in order to shift blame from themselves to the banks that wrote the loans.
Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations. Alinsky would be proud.
Re:Government fighting the market (Score:4, Interesting)
Will you stop with this Austrian nonsense.
1) Inflation is the measure of price increases not the increase in base currency. If the Fed were to create tons of MZM but no increase in minted dollar we would have massive inflation. Conversely if the Fed/Treasury/Mint printed 10x as many dollar but didn't change MZM there wouldn't be any inflation.
2) Inflation generally does at least in the short term increase productivity. The lag between printing of money and raising of prices creates artificial wealth which creates artificial demand. If the economy is demand constrained, which is often the case when governments start engaging in inflationary policies, production increases.
3) "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." In most countries at this point the fixed income is inflation adjusted. The real issue is quite a lot of the bottom 99% are net debtors while the top 1% tend to be creditors. Policies designed to shift wealth from creditors to debtors benefit the bottom not the top.
4) During the period of time prior to the 1930s where we had a lightly regulated financial system we had frequent panics. Once we had a highly regulated financial system we had few if any. As we moved back to a lightly regulated financial system we had several major panics. I'd say the correlation is not that government causes the problem.
5) If busts were just restructuring of debt we wouldn't see panics depress activity in areas of the economy with little or no debt. They would be more localized than they are. The fact that panics seem to depress activity across almost all sectors means that they just depress demand and this sets off a chain reaction.
Re:I'm in Buenos Aires (Score:5, Interesting)
The current situation in Argentina reminds me of Brazil before Plano Real [wikipedia.org] when inflation was around 60% per month and people where running for the dollar. Some years before that the government froze 80% of the bank assets [wikipedia.org] of the whole population, which was a total disaster.
In retrospect, it is amazing that Plano Real actually worked. I'm still amazed when I think about it: I was born in 1980 and in my lifetime I've seen Brazil adopt 6 different currencies! New governments would announce over the weekend that the currency have been renamed and three zeros have been cut (1000 = 1); until new banknotes were available the banks were stamping the old ones with the new name and value. Prices and contracts were frozen; it was a mess...
Even today many people still go to the supermarket and buy groceries for the whole month, out of habit. In the old times of hyper-inflation, you had to rush to the supermarket and buy everything you could because if you went in the morning and later went again in the same day but during the afternoon instead, prices would have changed already. When I was a young kid, and before we had barcode scanners and a ticket with the price was fixed in every piece of merchandise, supermarkets had full-time employees that spend their whole day attaching the new prices. I remember that I ran more than once to grab something in the end of a long corridor while the employee was setting the new prices at the other end, so I could pay the old price before he had the opportunity to change it.
If Brazil managed to fix that mess I bet Argentina can, too. It might take a while, though: it took us more than two decades.