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Think 9% inflation is bad? Try 90%

nytimes.com

21 pointsmbustamanter9 comments

> To facilitate the trades, they used “créditos,” the club’s own currency, printed onto white paper. Why not just use dollars? Or in general, why doesn't a store open that sells everything in dollars? What will they do with dollars? Pay their employees in dollars!

I would imagine that government employees, who must get paid in pesos would quickly exchange all their money in the black market for dollars. Everyone else would just use dollars. So why isn't that the case?

In Argentina, we don't have enough small bills, or coins, to use dollars for everything.

The "créditos" were used in 2001 crisis only in low-income sectors

If the issue is denomination, what about using Chilean Peso? Currently the ratio is 7:1 and it is relatively stable to the USD.

https://archive.is/sPaSE

> “Small-faced bills are not accepted.” The face in question is Benjamin Franklin’s. The black market generally offers 3 percent more for newer $100 notes with Mr. Franklin’s enlarged portrait because they are harder to counterfeit.

I fear we are headed this way even in the U.S. For decades, I've been holding within my residence some for-emergency-use currency in $20s, $50s, and $100s, but am now slowly replacing all my older Benjamins ($100s) with newer ones I get from the ATM every 4-6 weeks. I haven't had much problem spending the older ones (I guess higher prices means making change isn't such a burden for retailers anymore), but they do often get more scrutiny, testing with the special pen, etc.

> I haven't had much problem spending the older ones

Generally speaking you have to take it, within a certain point of reason.

I will say that in my time in retail, I've seen 50s or 100s that looked 'weird' to me but after a pen/light check looked fine. The choke point is somewhere between a hot wash and a high heat dry of the bill; it just starts to look (shrunken/grainish)/feel (too fibrous) off. The older a bill is (unless it's one of those 'special saved for a long time bills', but sometimes those look off because of how pristine they are) the more likely it will be to have gone through one of these events.

That said, we always would at minimum marker-check anything over 20$, even if it was a semi-lazy 'sweep' over a small portion.

Of course, if I was ever questioned by a customer, I'd give some polite fiction (educating people about the Eurion Constellation is a fun diversion!) or some education on why. Optionally, if it was a customer I'd know really well, (I had a few of those) I'd try to play 'psychic' and guess what laundry settings the bill went through. Those folks usually enjoyed the learning experience about decay of currency (I have a type I guess.)

EDIT:

I'll also add, I'm guessing the Argentina black market probably has a lower ability to detect 'supernotes'; i.e. counterfeit notes created by an organization that has the resources of a (possibly adversarial) government with sufficient resources and funding. IIRC some of the older 100$ notes were among those known to be impacted.

Maybe Argentina will go back to using precious metals. Then it'll truly be the land of argentum.

Think this headline is garbage? Go look at the last 90 headlines from the NYT.

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