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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

Getting off the peso means a huge loan to buy all the existing money to get it on USD. It'll be real interesting to see if it can happen. Argentina has and can be great. I wish them luck.

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Argentina is effectively on the USD anyway. The peso has lost so much value that people quote prices in dollars for real estate and other large items, and convert dollars every day to pesos to buy ordinary things, but not from the official channels because they do not give you a market rate.

I wonder if dollarization will be an improvement just from the less bureaucracy and need to get around the government to do things as they are already done.

Yes, but also from the point of view that it will get rid of 140%+ year over year inflation.

Yes, that's one way. The other is to price everything in both dollars and pesos and accept both. Eventually, the dollar will dominate and they can work towards the complete change. It's also something they can do very quickly and it's less shocking to the economy.

I doubt they can come up with enough dollars in one shot to switch over all at once so that's unlikely.

Good point about dual acceptance as this is already occuring anyway. Thanks!

Would they need to do it all at once like this? How have other countries that have officially dollarized handled the transition, if there are any major ones?

It looks like the list of countries besides US that exclusively use USD is small, none with a population over 100k, although I know several economies have de facto dollarized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_substitution#Countrie...

Maybe that Wikipedia list is out of date. I'd thought Ecuador was running on dollars.

The entirety of the European Union changed their national currencies to a new one, from scratch (no prior partial euroization), essentially overnight, in 2002. It’s definitely doable, if properly planned.

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