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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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any payment in pesos is immediately converted to other stores of value more readily capable of holding its value ranging from hard goods such as bricks, to US dollars, to Crypto.

Wouldn't this also drive inflation? Like.. quite significantly. I wonder what the velocity of money is in Argentina. People basically playing hot potato with cash, and probably willing to overpay for something in order to get money off their hands. Then the goods they buy to store value just sit around.

Argentina should peg their peso to gas. But then there'd be rapid deflation as everyone tries to offload their bricks and such, eager to get their hands on pesos. Maybe peg it to bricks... lol.

And that is without taking into account Cartel activities and Corruption in general.

Velocity is probably less than you'd expect. It's not been growing very rapidly:

https://www.cato.org/commentary/its-time-dump-argentinas-peso#

However, emerging economies tend to have a high demand for money, as the financial system develops and people invest more in deposits than in commodities, land, children etc.

The tried-and-tested route to monetary stability for countries like Argentina is a currency board. Abolish the central bank and have 1 to 1 convertibility of the peso with the dollar.

Unfortunately, Argentina is unlikely to adopt a currency board, because their previous experience with a superficially similar system was a disaster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998%E2%80%932002_Argentine_great_depression

An alternative is just to dump the peso altogether and start using dollars.

They also have a deeply entrenched and politicised ignorance of economics, e.g. I remember their central bank criticising the idea that inflation is a monetary phenomenon, and attributing it to profiteering and the like. A reliable indicator of inflationary policies!

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