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Paypal Users In Argentina Can No Longer Make Domestic Transactions
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."
Yeah. Look at all the people on Wall Street, who went to jail.
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.
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 .
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
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
MY OTHER COMMENTS
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.
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.
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)
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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.