Most of the time it's truly hard to see any alternative explanation, and I invest a lot to have the most nurtured worldview possible, with all the points of view considered. And even then, it's really hard to think in plausible alternative explanations that do not feel like pulling hair out of the head.
It's like duck typing: walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, has duck legs. It must be a duck.
It sounds like you have a bit of a persecution complex going on. It's unfortunate if the effects on your corner of the world are negative, but it's really not even on the Americans' map most of the time.
How about creating a local solution for your local needs instead of relying on a company like Binance whose operating principles are: "We are not headquartered anywhere, our auditor says they don't know what our parent company is named, but we'll happily transmit money to Iran"? That always seemed like it might catch up with them...
Let me provide accurate, real-world examples:
- 1 USD = 171.276 ARS (according to XE's website, this is the official exchange rate).
- 1 USD = 311.25 ARS (according to Binance's P2P exchange, this is the parallel/black market rate).
In Argentina, most stuff is valued in USD, even if the legal tender is ARS. If you were to buy a $2500 ARS burger with Binance money, that burger costs you $8.03 USD. If you were to buy that same exact burger with a licensed properly regulated exchange, that burger costs you $14.59 USD, almost the double.
This might seem like a trivial example, and a few dollars don't seem to make much of a difference. Try the same example with your weekly grocery store basket, rental apartments, payments of a car, etc. It all adds up and most people here don't earn more than $300 USD monthly (valued in black market exchange rate, of course).
Plus, Argentina and Venezuela are heavily taxed.
EDIT: Formatting of the example.
One problem with looking at the world through the lens of blaming others for local issues that you declare them in essence unfixable. If you find a way to make such a problem a local one you can actually do something about it.
> One problem with looking at the world through the lens of blaming others for local issues that you declare them in essence unfixable. If you find a way to make such a problem a local one you can actually do something about it.
I'd not say foreign actors like the U.S. Government are meddling with Argentinian or Venezuelan economy, but I'd say that if the U.S. Government were to kill Binance, that has negative impact on this side of the world (which is my original comment).
The core problem with this economy is that most people are uneducated about political and economical issues. All they want are the local government benefits. The state of the economy affects us all local residents, but without the support of the majority I cannot change it singlehandedly.
(please don't interpret my comment as defeatist, it's only there's so much a single person can do).
I get that, but that's not necessarily the fault of the regulators in other countries, much more the fault of the local government not being able to provide their citizens with a stable local currency.
> The core problem with this economy is that most people are uneducated about political and economical issues. All they want are the local government benefits. The state of the economy affects us all local residents, but without the support of the majority I cannot change it singlehandedly.
I very much sympathize with you, especially in light of the US's past willingness to interfere in those local affairs when it suited their business interests. Even so, the only real solution for this problem can come from inside. Argentina has tremendous potential, natural resources and a whole bunch of other things going for it, I sincerely hope that you and your fellow countrymen will be able to somehow turn this around and make it work.
Thanks for holding up in this debate! (and thanks for the good wishes, of course).
The typical order in which you address problems like these (looking at it historically) is to first fix your government, then to fix your economy and finally to reap the benefits from that. Argentina looked to me like it was heading in the right direction, this love affair with crypto is at best a distraction.
The economic situation has worsened for the commoner, everything gets more expensive gradually. People have started making concessions on what to buy or not.
The government is not fixable at this point, because of the populist agenda (same as Venezuela, but less deadly).
> if anything Argentinians will benefit from this because there are fewer ways in which they can lose their money.
It turns out the easiest way to lose the money is to keep it sitting at an Argentinian bank. The devaluation is just too violent. If you want to track how to country is doing, please track the black market exchange rate (which is why I claim in my original comment as the true king of the market). Tracking the official exchange rate as you're probably are doing, is not an effective measure as it's seldom used for transactions.
For a practical example, see [0].
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Laszlo Csatary is probably who you are thinking of. We're rapidly approaching the end of the hunt though, simply because there are fewer and fewer of the escapees still alive.
Also, let's not belittle the involvement of the German scientists that went to the US in the Nazi campaign, they knew very well what they were doing and each and every rocket launched against London had the signature of Werner von Braun on it. See also: Tom Lehrer.
That oversight in theory is good. In practice it turns out to be: "The OFAC and FATF hate your people as a whole. We cannot service you anymore. Kthxbai."
I will trust regulators when regulators do not exclude people where systems would be most useful. It all boils down to: if you're not credit worthy, you must be a terrorist, capomafia or at best, a tax evader.
See what happened to Uphold[0], which is unfortunate.
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[0]: https://support.uphold.com/hc/en-us/articles/6782239879451-W...
Exactly, another thing that happens is that the ways money is exchanged for black markets[0] is also the way terrorists and tax evaders would use. So, we share the same "highway" and get classified as such.
But we aren't terrorists or tax evaders, we just need to make our lives less expensive.
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You aren't but you can bet that plenty of people even if they were not terrorists definitely were evading taxes by using these services, or at a minimum worsening the strength of the local currency. If enough people do that then the effect can be so strong that you end up leaving yourself no alternative. Obviously, a stable currency requires all parties to believe in it, and this is the first problem that any competent government would have to address.
I'm not condoning tax evasion, but in South America if you are on tax evasion and you're not wealthy then you evade taxes by ideological reasons.
As a South American citizen, you'd evade taxes for:
1) Choking the government, one cent at a time.
2) If you know the Treasury Dept. of the Local Govt. is going to be looted anyway by corrupt politicians, then why pay taxes? (the most common one).
It's very easy to loot the government, just bribe the Purchases Manager of any Govt. institution and pave your way to the local top elite.
This is a problem in a large part of the world, and even in countries where these factors are present the size of the workforce available for regulatory oversight is usually only a small fraction of the size of the workforce available for the industry itself. That's why something like WireCard could happen in Germany. And even if the demise of WireCard also hit a lot of non-players that still doesn't mean that it isn't a good thing that they are gone.
In the current times, that's nothing realistically accessible to Argentinian and Venezuelan people.
Too much "ideal" conditions need to happen at the same time. What we need are practical solutions.