Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Argentina's Government Openly Promotes Poverty

Poor Argentinians. The Argentine government does not only want to subtly confiscate savings of ordinary folks through inflationism, their government openly promotes poverty for the Argentina’s population through economic fascism and political repression.

From Nasdaq.com 
The president of Argentina's central bank has affirmed the government's policy of eliminating the U.S. dollar as a transaction and savings medium in the South American economy.

"De-dollarizing the economy is a challenge" and Argentines "have to save in local currency like [people] do everywhere else in the world," Mercedes Marco del Pont said in a speech late Friday night.

Argentines have long viewed the U.S. currency as a haven in times of economic uncertainty because of their country's long history of high inflation and periodic devaluations.

Mrs. Marco del Pont wants Argentines to save in pesos amid a backdrop of one of the highest rates of inflation in the Americas.

Annual inflation, which most economists say hovers around 25%, has eroded faith in the peso and fueled demand for dollars. The interest rates banks pay on deposits are well below inflation.

The government's data--which has been widely criticized by economists and the International Monetary Fund--put 12- month inflation at 10% in August.
Inflationism has only been part of the overall strategy of financial repression which has been coursed through fascist policies of nationalization, currency controls, strangulating regulations, civil liberty proscriptions (e.g ban on imported books) and more…
Since late October 2011, the government has severely restricted the public's access to the foreign-exchange market to stop capital flight that was slowly draining the central bank's international reserves.

The currency controls have dented economic activity, especially in the real estate sector where most transactions were done overwhelmingly in dollars.

Property sales in the capital city Bueno Aires plunged 35% on the year in August.

2 comments:

Hans said...

I do not know how a Socialist government promotes fascist policy..?

Or has it become fashionable to invert the obvious ?

benson_te said...

Hi Hans,

There are hardly any pure socialist (public ownership of factors of production)today. While Argentina does alot nationalizations, some of these functions are eventually awarded to allies or friends. So governments dictates on what a politically privileged company does but the benefits are privatized. So you have a mixed Socialist-fascist political economy.

Hope this helps,