Topic: Argentine leading candidate: Pro Bitcoin, anti CentralBank, wants dollarization - page 2. (Read 394 times)

Dollarization will never solve all problems running a central bank honestly. It may mean less people losing their wealth compared to past but anyways American fiat money also has inflation and it also loses paper value too. Probably its losing lot more than past even nowadays. But bitcoin friendly politician is always good for us all. He can at least soften limitations enforced around Bitcoin and probably encourage Blockchain or Bitcoin related investments more. It may benefit Argentina.

I agree, that's the point. In the 1990s, while there were some structural reforms they were aimed at the wrong problems, and thus, Argentine economy didn't gain but lose competitivity due to the "quasi-dollarization" move.

Corruption is a very important point. Argentine society needs to really wake up in this regard. While I personally haven't experienced things like bribery, persons I trust do have. For example, it's a popular "sport" of Argentine politicians to pay higher prices to external services providers than what they require (so-called sobreprecio), and then agree with the provider to steal a part of that money. I guess that corruption could boost Argentine's state services' productivity at least 10% - and that's approximately what their ("real") fiscal deficit per year ist.

Then there are economic sectors which have low competitiveness because they always get selected by the political leaders for services (bribery is suspected sometimes, of course), for example in the construction sector.

About Bitcoin: I think making it legal tender is indeed not something that would currently help to stabilize the countries' finances. Bitcoin isn't stable enough still. However, a good regulation framework could help to attract investments in this sector. Argentina fares quite well in the software sector already, but becoming a global blockchain/crypto-assets-services player (e.g. taking some market away from the US) could of course improve the situation even more. Two of the main presidential candidates (Milei and Massa) are Bitcoin-friendly, and the third (Bullrich) comes from a party which historically has had a pro-Bitcoin stance. I have thus some expectation the general situation regarding Bitcoin in the country can improve, regardless of who wins.

It is an interesting development that change in Political leadership, such as Javier Mile winning the presidential elections, could impact the adoption and perception of Bitcoin in Argentina. Political leaders can in deed influence the policies that promote or hinder the growth of cryptocurrencies in the country. It is also crucial to note that political leaders often encounter challenges in translating their political agenda into action, particularly within the complex framework of well established democratic nation. Achieving consensus among diverse group of legislators is a formidable task, that demands skillful negotiations to navigate different viewpoints effectively.

I don't know how politics in Argentina is, but for where I came from politician will say anything to get themself elected. With the 114% annual inflation, moving to a bitcoin will be popular promise, though I would argue that those policy alone wouldn't instantly make the economy could recover, but at least the candidate will get the vote, that's all they want. It would be good for market if Argentina will actually get rid of centralbank and move to bitcoin, but if it's not even after the candidate who was promising those is elected, I wouldn't be so surprise.

It's a bit of an odd position to be in, a potential leader. Bitcoin is cool of course - but it doesn't stabilize the economy. Dollarization, with the replacement of domestic currency with the U.S. dollar - well, we can allow it as a solution, for some stabilization period. But it does not solve the essence - the problems in the economy. Probably it is necessary to reform the economy, fight corruption, develop high margin sectors of the economy, and similar actions aimed at solving the problem. But do not emphasize solutions that "hide" the problems.... Moreover, everyone understands perfectly well that they will only temporarily hide the problems. It is like trying to treat a disease by hiding the manifestations of the disease, instead of treating the cause of the disease itself.

Why should it work with dollarization and not with an unified South American currency?
Again, in the 1990s it worked.

I wrote that already. The countries, mainly Argentina of course, would have to be well prepared and coordinate their policy a lot for such a move. But in 2018-22, there was also the hurdle of an ideologically-related "cooling down" of relation between these two countries, so that eliminated all possibilities of a coordination. There was Covid, too. As of 2023, Brazil of course wouldn't take further steps in the short term if they don't know who wins this year's election. If Bullrich or Massa win (together their parties have ~60% of the vote, even if they're ideologically strongly opposed, at least when they're campaigning ), however, I'd expect further steps in this direction, as both want to strengthen Mercosur.

In supermarkets, prices are displayed in pesos in Argentina. 100-150% inflation doesn't mean that prices change every day, but every couple of weeks you can expect a 10-20% increase. In some sectors, mainly real estate and upper-class tourist accomodation (hotels, cabins ...) you may find prices in dollars.
However, dollarized prices were much more common in the early 2000s. For example, when MercadoLibre started, they had the option to use prices in dollars, and electronics were almost all priced in USD. I don't know if this was forbidden but now it's much less common, even if inflation was much lower then.

At the contrary, several US politicians and also IMF functionaries have already expressed they oppose that move, see this La Nación article.

When your country has been going through several years of crippling inflation, eventually people start to replace their positive feelings and patriotism with negative feelings and seek to protect their capital with other currencies. I am from Venezuela, so I know what I am talking about, all of it comes to a point where people is willing to give up part of their culture in order not to be always checking the price of the pesos against the USD.

Venezuelan economy is already dollarized in many levels, expect salaries. We ask for prices in malls and stores and we get the price in USD, not local currency. It must be the same in Argentina

El Salvador changed its national currency to $ 20+ years ago, and as a country that is much smaller than Argentina, I don't see that this change has transformed the country economically (for the better), although we can rightly wonder what would have happened if that they didn't do it.

Maybe the size of the country really makes a difference, although it seems to me that regardless of the fact that Argentina is one of the largest countries in the world, their problems are far more complex than which currency they would choose. In other words, if you don't have smart politicians who work for the good of the country, everything else is in vain.

How are you going to get rid of centralized Banking and at the same time switch to the US Dollar as your local currency? Yes, it will help them to have a more stable economy and much less volatility, but they will be a slave to the West again. (The US Dollar and the US economy are one of the most complex economies in the world, with a lot of manipulation going on in the back rooms) 

The adoption of Bitcoin will not go well, with the US Dollar being used as a replacement for the Peso... citizens have a lot of sentimental feelings towards their local currency. 

That's oxymoron!

It seems Javier Milei is another puppet of America. Otherwise, no good country will ever want to replace their own currency and adopt currency from another country. That's definitely a negative but if he has won the presidential primary, that means a lot of stupid people support this fellow.

Replacing currency with USD may work for smaller countries but when it comes to a country which ranks 23rd in global list, might bring disaster.

I make topics mostly to see what others think and to enjoy myself, If I see zero interest then I realize what people are interested in and how much they either care or know about something, still calling it good research. I have another bunch ready in the last few days and this is all I can do sitting 12 hours in the sun but it's a pain in the ass to get images and copy the text on a tablet for more detailed topics! 


I still believe that you can't screw a country more like this, and 100 years...we didn't have half of the countries currently in Europe! 
Things come and go, and as you said, subsidies and freebies and gifts to keep the masses happy is one bulletproof way to make them go away.


Hm, honestly, no idea! I think just the next step is too complicated thinking what will happen after this with two "if" it's out of my league.


So you're saying no politicians should accuse the former leaders of corruption just because he is also a politician?
If you start from the idea that they're all corrupt and they should shut up then basically you're admitting no change will ever happen and everyone that goes voting is just empowering corruption.


Remind me why is Argentina in this mess in the first place. And you expect them to magically do the right thing after half of century of proving they are unwilling to do so? Wishful thinking!

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No, it's no ideology it's basic financial stuff.
Brazil doesn't want to get paid in a currency that devaluates by the week and that no one else wants, they have a positive trade so they end with one billion worth of pesos, oh wait it's 900m, by the time you read the topic is 700million  and Argentina can't afford to buy reals as it would be the same as buying in USD, so it makes no sense. It's a copy-paste thing of what Russia and India got through and they solved it by using the UEA dirham, which, is pegged to the dollar! The irony, right?

But are the countries (Brazil, Europe) you mention in a "crisis"? No. They're doing quite well. So is Argentina - in terms of employment. In terms of inflation it's completely another story. Here Argentina is a disaster.
Basically what I want to say is that in Argentina there is a financial crisis, not so much an economic crisis. Companies are in general doing well.
There's a retroalimentation between inflation and consumption. Consumption is driving inflation, and inflation is driving consumption (and capital flight).

I almost expected that answer

But both states would need to increase fiscal discipline if they bound their currencies together. That's the main benefit of the idea. There probably would have to be criteria like the Copenhagen requirements for the Eurozone to join this area. By the way, Argentina's peso is the only currency in the region that suffered such a big devaluation in the last decade. The real is doing well (has lost 30% of its value against the dollar since 2003, most of it in two crisis including COVID, but that's not bad at all), as is the boliviano (its value has even increased in the last 20 years, it could hold well a floating peg to USD), the peso uruguayo (lost approx. 30% since 2003), and the Guaraní (lost 20% since 2003).

But the advantage compared to simply adopting the dollar is if there is a regional crisis, e.g. caused by a drought or oil prices, then the currency can temporarily become weaker, to later strengthen again if relative conditions with respect to the US are more favorable. In contrast, if the US enters a crisis, it allows the countries to strengthen their currency, like it occurred to the Brazilian real in the late 2000s/early 2010s, when the BRL became itself overvalued reaching 0.6 USD (coming from 0.3) and then falling down again to 0.3 and after COVID to 0.2.

The problem is that there is not enough coordination. The plans to "skip" the dollar were renewed in May 2023 but Brazil is obviously currently the one trying to slow down. The problem is also that when there are ideological differences between both governments these initiatives can come to a complete halt. That's definitely something which has to be improved.

That's a very simplified point of view (although Milei is trying to install it in the discussion).
First, Argentina had almost no population in 1900 (few millions). There was also practically no industry. The "business model" of the country in this era was to be an almost pure pure agrarian state (heavy industry appeared only in the 1920s/30s). This would be unsustainable today, as the agrarian sector needs not much labour force.
Second, the big problem of Argentina is that it never sustained policies over more than 10 years. This led to a weak industrial sector. Peronist governments had its share of this problem as they often created and sustained uncompetitive economic areas, but also the military dictatorships trying to establish the pre-1930s model again in the 70s, and they failed completely.

The debt crisis in the early 80s in the last years of the military government was the reason for the general Argentine debt problem which started to become massive in the 90s and then led to the collapse in 2001. But this debt problem is still the background of the current crisis: Argentina had always problems in the last decades to get external financing, so it had to very high interest rates. This led to the current situation where the central bank prints money to finance the country's fiscal deficit, and this boosts inflation. I could write entire books about this (as you suspect, I have "first hand" knowledge of the situation in AR) but let's end here

I don't see it as a "mindfuck moment". Bitcoin isn't suitable to become an actual currency. BTC is more of a financial asset(digital gold) than a real currency for daily use.
Ditching completely a weak currency like the Argentinian peso for the US dollar seems like a reasonable move. The US dollar has it's flaws, but it's way more stable in comparison to the Argentinian peso(even though the peso was pegged to the US dollar).
Having no national central bank might be better than having an irresponsible central bank.
Being pro-USD and pro-Bitcoin at the same time isn't so absurd as you think. Unfortunately, most of the Bitcoin maximalists live in a "black and white" type of world, where the US dollar is seen as the root of all evil, while Bitcoin being viewed is the solution to all problems.

Undoubtedly, this candidate is on the wave of hype and skillfully uses it, but still, he makes a good advertisement for bitcoin, not only in Argentina, but throughout the world, because this news somehow appears in the media of other countries. Whatever happens, it's all good as long as it doesn't harm the bitcoin.

Question: how does this presidential candidate plan to use \ integrate btc into the economy of his country? Does he have any program on this subject, or is his love for bitcoin only empty statements about it? For everything good (bitcoin) and against everything bad (central banks) - such are his loud statements?

This sounds funny:
Javier Milei himself is the same politician as those whom he accuses.

Internal problems a country faces can only be solved by internal changes which improves the economy. Being pro Bitcoin cannot improve the standard of living of citizens or generate more jobs or improve international trade if the country does not have exports. Same way dollarization does not boost an economy.

Best case scenario it is indicative of the willingness of the candidate to adapt to moedern solutions and could mean they can equally take drastic decisions in other areas of affairs which will have telling impact on the economy.

It can also be a way of telling people what you think they want to hear. I have not followed the election long enough to know the precedent of the candidate but sometimes or everytime politicians play a psychological game to convince people they are the best man for the job..it's less of what you plan to do and more of what you've already done.

Let's see what happens in October, as you said, and what are the real changes he proposes if he eventually wins. In my country (Spain) he is being very criticised both because he is an extremist and also because he resembles Trump in some ways. Taking into account how little Trump did for crypto (even if we know now that he holds more than 2 million in Ethereum alone, according to the latest news) we still have to see how he implements the proposed changes in Argentina.

The bad thing I see with this thread is that since it is a serious one in which you have to have some knowledge to comment, it has not received many responses and will probably die for lack of them in a short time. I don't know if d5000 knows first hand the situation in Argentina or South America in general, as I see that he posts on the German and Spanish local boards.

In any case, if Milei wins, he intends to turn the country upside down, a country that had the highest GDP per capita in the world more than a century ago, a country where people emigrated in search of opportunities and a better life. By handing out subsidies and creating large layers of the population dependent on them has ended up in the disaster it is today. It is the result of Peronism.

I understand that taking the power of the printer away from Argentine politicians would force them to have to balance income and expenses because they could not simply print more, but I wonder: supposing Milei won in October and carried this out, would it cost much for an incoming Peronist president after Milei to re-create a local currency? I don't think so.

Replace Argentina with Brazil in that chart and you see the same post-COVID trend in employment, switch to Salvador and you have the same growth we can go to any other country and depending how long ago they've opened their economy the same happened, Europe is breaking records over records in this metric.

As for consumption, of course, there is consumption, because with the money you get on the 1st you can get 100 pizzas and by the 31st you can get only 80. It's private consumption driven out of fear, not out of how good things are and how much money they have.

Spend now, worry later: no point saving in inflation-stricken Argentina
Exactly what you were saying:

So, trying to peg your useless currency to other currencies that might be just as bad and that have continuously lost ground against the USD could be better...
You know Argentina and Brazil tried to drop the dollar in 2009, right? Why do they still carry plans on making the trade in peso and reals and other currency somewhere in the middle then?   Because just as Russia realized when it got paid in rupees that when you get paid in shitcoins there is nobody else wanting you shitcoins!

These agreements are just like a bounty campaign here!
They can't afford to pay their users in BTC so they pay them in their shitty tokens they can print endlessly, and once the payments are made they drop like a fly as everyone receiving those shitcoins runs to the exchange to convert them into either BTC or USDT. Just how people in Argentina are doing now with their peso or Indians with their rupees or Rusian with their ruble!  

I've already mentioned unemployment. In the last years, believe it or not, employment improved a lot, even compared with pre-COVID times (and it's not only due to the State growing, it's primarily private employment). Private consumption is also quite high currently (see this New York Times article about restaurants being always packed). Also, sanitary conditions have improved continuously in the last decades, like we can see with child mortality.

So yeah, it could be much worse. The situation is a bit paradoxical, but only at the first glance: The high consumption may have been one of the main reasons (apart from delayed effects of COVID subsidies and its M1 explosion) which propelled the inflation from a mere 25-40% to 120%+.

In the 1990s currency board Argentina, unemployment initially got better, but from 1995 on (impact Tequila crisis) rates above 10-15% were common. In 2001 the "convertibilidad" regime collapsed with 18% unemployment.

I still think such a regime can work (as in Bulgaria and the Eurozone in general) but taking its time and giving the industry time and measures to adapt. However, I think the US dollar isn't perhaps the best currency for Argentina to peg its currency to, as its main trade partner is Brazil, the US is third (if taking EU countries as separate entities).

My personal "advice" (if I had any power or legitimacy to do that ) to Argentina's government would instead to be to advance with a Mercosur monetary union (with Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia). There were some very timid steps towards a creation of an Argentina/Brazil "unit of account" (like the ECU was in Europe) but almost nothing. A dollarization could close that door, which would benefit potentially all of South America, for a long time.

About the GDP per capital: that graph if any shows how overvalued Argentina's currency was in the 1990s due to the still relatively high inflation rate. If any currency board/external currency adoption steps are taken then this effect would have to be avoided.

Pegging the currency of a nearly failed state that is heavily in debt to a stable one is not really the miraculous solution and is secondary and more importantly, Argentina didn't really peg the peso all the way to the dollar, that's one of the reasons for the failure as they allowed preferential rates for exports which obviously made the state lose money, and the second one was the government didn't stop printing peso and didn't stop getting in debt in us dollars.
If the country is ok with no fundamental issues plaguing the economy you can peg our currency to the us or euro with no problem, even the Bulgarians are managing to use the leva with euro parity and let's not even talk about the Danish krone.

Anyhow, here we're talking about completely abandoning the peso, which means the country won't have to balance the national currency to keep with the us dollar, all they will have to do si adjust their economy to match one of the other fifty states  . And, to be honest right now, how it could be worse than what they have now?


Growth can be misleading, it depends on what that growth is based on



Ignore the last two years in Argentina's case as there is a note there that the data uses the official currency rate and not the black market one.
In 2000 when one was preparing to adopt and one to renounce the peg Argentina had a 4:1 advantage in GDP per capita, now it's more like 1.2 :1.