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What is going on in Argentina?

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Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#91

Post by froblesmartin »

epolanski wrote: post #37
ricotico060 wrote: post #4

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.

Inflation is a symptom, not the cause. Not sure how Argentinians are supposed to do better using cryptocurrencies.

Well, at least you can save and not be in the need to spend your money soon, as it then devalues quickly, which helps to stop inflation :D

They could just search € or USD, which they do :D But the government used to have a cap of 200$ per person and month to exchange (not sure if that still happens now with Milei)

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#92

Post by cassianoleal »

inglor_cz wrote: post #54
kingofthehill98 wrote: post #8

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 ret…

"700k brazilians died to COVID, we now have a huge anti-vax problem" That sounds like a common world problem, not anything specifically Brazilian. In my country of 11 million (including Ukrainian refugees), we've had 45 thousand deaths. And anywhere where people frequent Facebook, the anti-vax movement thrives. It is not even specifically far-right, a lot of the crowd belongs to the organic green bio-mom milieu. I ca…

> The coup thing is fairly unique, though.

Not as much. It was heavily inspired by the events in the USA.

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#93

Post by thworp »

kingofthehill98 wrote: post #40
swarnie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've tested many different ideologies and organisational structures just in the last few hundred years. Currently we have a successful but pretty crappy form of capitalism. Some countries have experimented with Communism, fascism, oligarchy (ism)?), feudalism ect ect. Why not give libertarianism a shot?

>Why not give libertarianism a shot? Because it's capitalism on steroids? Are you not aware of the world we're living in? Every major forest destroyed, countless species exctinct, climate change reaching point of no return, etc. We urgently need to slow down, not speed up.

This is such a tired argument. The socialist block was, at least by the 1980s, much more wasteful and destructive to the environment than the capitalist world. I encourage you to search for videos like "1980s krakow winter" or "Elbe river GDR" to see a few examples. Then for comparison research when capitalist countries passed their various environmental protection laws.

More than that, it's easy to make abstract statements like "we need to slow down", but how do you imagine that could be done? Who decides which sectors need to be frozen and how do we make sure we don't accidentally starve millions of Africans while doing it (look up food self-sufficiency numbers)?

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#94

Post by impostervt »

bitdivision wrote: post #12

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…

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.

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#95

Post by pjc50 »

froblesmartin wrote: post #91
epolanski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is a symptom, not the cause. Not sure how Argentinians are supposed to do better using cryptocurrencies.

Well, at least you can save and not be in the need to spend your money soon, as it then devalues quickly, which helps to stop inflation :D They could just search € or USD, which they do :D But the government used to have a cap of 200$ per person and month to exchange (not sure if that still happens now with Milei)

The inflation is still a symptom of the balance of payments problem. What cryptocurrency lets you do is evade the capital controls and get closer to dollar-referenced currency.

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#96

Post by Wytwwww »

rwmj wrote: post #63
Havoc wrote: post #16

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

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.

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.

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#97

Post by miunau »

javcasas wrote: post #78
swarnie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've tested many different ideologies and organisational structures just in the last few hundred years. Currently we have a successful but pretty crappy form of capitalism. Some countries have experimented with Communism, fascism, oligarchy (ism)?), feudalism ect ect. Why not give libertarianism a shot?

Do you know why the USA is the richest country in the world while being full of homeless, or has the strongest army in the world while having the shittiest healthcare of all developed countries? Because liberalism, I/E shrink the state so that ~the corporations can rule~ the invisible hand of the market can fix everything. Even Adam Smith recognised that you need a state to limit the power of the big actors in the in…

It seems like you are confusing two different terms, liberalism and libertarianism.

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#98

Post by mparnisari »

kingofthehill98 wrote: post #8

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 ret…

> They elected a freakin' maniac and they're gonna pay a heavy price for that

LMAO like the previous twenty years didn't exist eh?

Signed: an Argentinian

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#99

Post by aaronrobinson »

ramblerman wrote: post #25
7thaccount wrote: post #11

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…

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?

I think it expresses the depth of his character. He’s been good at a few things - one of them just happens to be sex guru. It’s also about as far away as you get from economists (sorry economists).

Re: What is going on in Argentina?

#100

Post by 3x35r22m4u »

"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

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