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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.
Or 3 under Mitt.
Learn to love Alaska
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"!
Governments used to be able to easily control currency flows because banks were needed to move money and for most people it was not easy to move small amounts. Now, with PayPa, for example, it's a lot easier to move a few hundred dollars across borders. How long is it before Argentineans with friends and relatives abroad "buy" things - effectively converting pesos into dollars and then have that person bring back dollars or keep them safely out of reach of the authorities? The authorities will have to setup ways to monitor online "sales" and collect taxes at the time of sale or tax PayPal transactions at the time of money transfer. 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.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Too much of the Argentine economy consists of raising cheap beef for the US market. Most countries that are de facto producers for the US are screwed up. (And before you decide that is flamebait, go take a serious look at the CIA World Factbook.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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
Dear Sir
I am a successful Argentinian businessman who is in urgent need of your assistance. I have the sum of $10,000,000 equivalent in US Dollars which I need to transfer to an associate of mine in this country. Due to restrictive government policy, we require a 3rd party intermediary located outside the country. If you are willing to provide your services for this task, we will compensate you the sum of $5,000 USD. Please contact me as soon as possible, urgency is high in our minds to accomplish this transaction.
Our email address is: 9racdge82@mailvault.com
Sincerely,
Your Future Associates
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.
Furthermore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Price_Administration
Facts are inconvenient for some.
--
BMO
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.
realize politics isn't a fucking sporting event between two teams
Except, it kinda does work that way.
Most people just have the teams wrong - Not red vs blue, not plebes vs silver-spoons, but rather "all of us" vs "anyone who runs for public office".
Oddly, despite having the bigger team, we usually lose.
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.
I don't even recall any of the bankers themselves losing their jobs really. It was all the support staff that suffered like IT, admin, and customer facing branch staff. In this respect, and as the investment banks and customer facing banks are often different sub-companies, I'm not even sure people from investment arms of banks really paid a price at all for the most part.
Also, a year later, they were all getting hefty bonuses again to boot.
"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.
Actually, this kind of "gaming" of the system (called "arbitrage" in economics circles (although this is kind of a special case of arbitrage, because currencies are not traditionally viewed in exactly the same way as other goods and services)) is essentially unpreventable. Requiring an international transaction just makes it a two-step process instead of a one-step process (and perhaps also assures that in most cases there will be more than one person involved), but it doesn't change anything that matters. If they shut down Paypal altogether (in Argentina, or using their currency), other mechanisms will surface. As long as the Argentine peso is worth one amount inside Argentina and a different amount in the rest of the world, people will be buying it in the cheaper place and selling it in the place where it's worth more. The people who do this turn a profit, and either the prices in the two places are brought closer together or, if someone is artificially keeping them apart, doing so costs money, which goes into the pockets of whoever is doing the arbitrage.
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.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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
So, the era of the USA is at an end, along with the ridiculous culture they've created.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth