I was there a few months ago. For me (without dollars), the best way to get cash was to western union it to myself. They tend to have rates at or around the dollar blue rate. The only painful part of this is that if you send yourself more than around $100 you're going to have to try various western union shops before finding one with enough cash.
The other thing to note is that Mastercard (and Visa I believe) have a newer rate specifically aimed at tourists (the MEP rate), which normally stays closer to the informal rate (blue dollar rate). Annoyingly they tend to charge your account with the official rate, and then refund the difference a few days later.
There's also this website which has a view of all the different rates: https://bluedollar.net/
I did this with my sister who was digital nomading in Argentina a few months ago. The easiest thing we found was for me to send her $3k via western union, which converted into an ungodly amount of pesos she picked up down there.
It was super sketchy. When I sent the money, the western union person said there was a chance western union would block it because it was such a large amount, but luckily it went through. When my sister picked it up, they basically stuffed it into a backpack to carry around. Seemed very dangerous to be carrying that much cash (even in the US it would be), but it worked out ok.
Yep, western union do tend to have a long kyc check after your first transfer I think. Which can delay things a few days. But after that I never really had a problem. I never heard of anyone getting their transaction completely blocked though.
Argentina has been like this for a very long time. I studied abroad there in 2019 and it was exactly the same. I believe one of the reasons Brian Armstrong started Coinbase was because he saw how devastating inflation was to Argentina’s economy. Argentina was at one point a top 20 country in the world wealth wise and has obviously gone very down hill. It’s too bad, a lot of talented tech workers there.
The GDP of the rest of the world went up a lot more than that [1] - and Argentina never did anything besides have decent weather and a roughly constant amount of fertile land.
People didn't really need smartphones, laptops and even personal cars in 1960s in Argentine. I believe they generated that GDP while being mostly rural, where it translates to a lot of amenities.
Now they would usually be cramped in a city where the effective cost of living is much greater (leading to villas), whereas their GDP and thus income didn't grow much.
1) I used to work in a very large IT group in Latin America, and I worked with some EngManagers who hired and managed some folks in Argentina. One interesting dynamic was due to the inflation, we used to give to folks 'monthly' salary increases to offset. Since the company captured the inflation also in the prices, for a long time offer that offset with a small plus was a very huge retention factor for us;
2) After 2015/6, our IT director started to give 1 Bitcoin or USD 500 equivalent in Bitcoin for our argentine colleagues as part of their monthly salary, and eventually those guys ended up holding or selling it with more than 10x over it.
Well, at least you can save and not be in the need to spend your money soon, as it then devalues quickly, which helps to stop inflation :D
They could just search € or USD, which they do :D But the government used to have a cap of 200$ per person and month to exchange (not sure if that still happens now with Milei)
They'd be better off holding literally any _other_ currency. US dollars are hard to get in large quantities, and you'd be stuck holding a lot of cash. Bitcoin (or any crypto currency, BTC isn't unique here) is just easier to buy and hold as a hedge against inflation
Been there in 2014 with a group of friends. We ran out of cash. I took the ferry to Uruguay with 4 credit cards and for a day each 2 hours draw the max sum the ATM let me. Returned with 4k dollars in my pockets. Not before I bought something to smoke and smoked a big doobie on the beach in the sunset. God, I miss this muchileros life.
I submitted a transcript from Javier Milei's address at the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, which I think explains a bit about what is happening, and what is about to happen, from the eyes of the newly elected president who has pretty strong and "out of the ordinary" opinions and ideas.
I don't think it's that extreme of a perspective. I'm surprised that the perspective he's speaking against, which when implemented reliably causes citizen impoverishment and death should be spoken about more in those terms, I think.
Perhaps, if you have never been to the West - the object of Milei's criticism - it is possible to believe that it is a world where people are impoverished and dying through evil collectivists providing welfare states. For everyone else, that's a perspective as extreme as his chainsaw stunts.
Milei's bark is likely to prove more extreme than his bite, of course. He's already pointedly not abolishing the central bank and quietly mending relations with China.
We are driving our future off a cliff by allowing collectivism to return over libertarianism.
For example his perspective would be very consistent with the perspectives of the founding fathers of the United States. The Founding Fathers would have widely agreed with the speech’s support for free-market capitalism and its critique of collectivism, socialism, and excessive state intervention. Advocating principles that promote economic freedom and prosperity would resonate with them as a reflection of their own efforts to create a government that promotes individual liberty and economic opportunity. celebration of the entrepreneur as a hero of prosperity and its warning against state overreach would likely find broad support among the Founding Fathers. They were, after all, establishing a new nation built on principles of liberty, property rights, and opposition to tyranny. The speech’s call for economic freedom and limited government intervention mirrors the Founding Fathers’ debates on the proper role and size of government. Many of the Founding Fathers, like Alexander Hamilton, would likely support the speech’s endorsement of free-market capitalism. The emphasis on economic freedom and the role of free enterprise in lifting people out of poverty would resonate with his and similar Founders’ views on economic development.
Yet somehow this is generally considered the majority opinion today of his speech:
> has pretty strong and "out of the ordinary" opinions and ideas
> I think explains a bit about what is happening, and what is about to happen
There is a lot of distance between promising economic changes and getting a positive outcome. His path seems to include a lot of reducing income to the government, privatization of government services and shuttering government branches that promote sciences, etc.
Interestingly Cowen and Tabarrok follow this topic closely on Marginal Revolution. also some interesting insights in the comments section there, which is mostly economics-oriented.
This speech has no legs to stand on. His key premise conflates the industrial revolution with a special definition of capitalism. Which for his ideology has perfect price discovery and a world where no large corporations collude with other. His main course is your usual slab of blaming socialism, sprinkled with side blame at feminists and environmentalists.
I don't see anything worth reading here. It is deceptive with intent and fundamentally unhinged.
I don't necessarily agree or disagree with Milei, I think my understand of the space and the country is too low to be able to do so.
But I disagree with "I don't see anything worth reading here", even if it's unhinged and you fundamentally disagree with their point of view.
He is the democratically elected president of a country in despair, and trying to understand what will happen to the country requires understanding the motivations behind the actions, which are laid bare in his speech, no matter how factual his points are.
They elected a freakin' maniac and they're gonna pay a heavy price for that.
In Brazil we have a saying "pior que tá não fica", which translates to something like "it cannot get worse than this". Belive me when I say this: it can (and probably will) get worse. It can (and probably will) get SO MUCH worse.
We tasted this poison with 4 years of Bolsonaro trying to get away from the establishment. What did we get in return? 700k brazilians died to COVID, we now have a huge anti-vax problem and after the piece of shit lost the election he attempted a COUP. Luckily he's going to jail on the next few months, but the damage is done.
Also unlike here in Brazil, from some interviews I felt like all (ok, most) argentinians were rooting that Milei's measures have a positive impact, even people that didn't vote for him. That did strike me as a very mature position.
The alternative was the economy minister largely responsible of how we got to where we are now. Minister of a president who basically said "you know what I'm out" in 2022 and basically gave the government to said minister.
> The alternative was the economy minister largely responsible of how we got to where we are now.
That's the problem though. It's completely understandable to vote against that. But to have one option to the status quo, and that option is this?
It's basically like you have lived beyond your means for a long while and you live in a too big house and the sensible solution might be to get another job, sell the car and move to a smaller place. But see that choice doesn't exist. Your choice is to keep aggregating debt, OR you burn the house down and live in a tent.
The problem with very bitter medicine like this is that it risks swinging back the other way just as fast when people become angry enough.
"700k brazilians died to COVID, we now have a huge anti-vax problem"
That sounds like a common world problem, not anything specifically Brazilian. In my country of 11 million (including Ukrainian refugees), we've had 45 thousand deaths. And anywhere where people frequent Facebook, the anti-vax movement thrives. It is not even specifically far-right, a lot of the crowd belongs to the organic green bio-mom milieu. I can't even begin to count all the middle-aged ladies in colourful ethnic clothing who hate vaccines based on very flimsy arguments.
>That sounds like a common world problem, not anything specifically Brazilian.
Before the pandemic I personally never saw a single person denying vaccines to their children. Our health system had one of the most successful vaccination programs in the world, we were nearing 100% rates on a country with a scale of continent. Since Bolsonaro our rates are dropping on a very alarming rate and on the streets you see people trash talking vaccines all the time, even solved diseases and infections are returning because of this.
And about the 700k deaths, a lot of studies have been published proving that if the piece of shit bought the vaccines earlier hundreds of thousands of lives could've been saved, or if he did not made a public campaign AGAINST the vaccine we could've saved countless lives.
Did you read the article? It’s all about the currency problems and disparate exchange rates that have resulted in the country for the last 20+ years and has nothing to do with the president who’s been there for hardly 2 months. One of his first acts actually tackled that problem by slashing the artificial government exchange rate so that it’s much closer to the true black market rate.
We've tested many different ideologies and organisational structures just in the last few hundred years.
Currently we have a successful but pretty crappy form of capitalism. Some countries have experimented with Communism, fascism, oligarchy (ism)?), feudalism ect ect.
We did. Until the 1950s. We gave the states so much power under a confederacy the government didn't work and we had to go back to the drawing board to make a new constitution.
Things weren't regulated for a long time, and that's why there were literal snake-oil salesmen blowing literal smoke up your ass while their 10 year old kids worked 7 days a week. It was only around the 1900s that we really started regulating things -- and for good reason.
Because it's capitalism on steroids? Are you not aware of the world we're living in? Every major forest destroyed, countless species exctinct, climate change reaching point of no return, etc.
Do you know why the USA is the richest country in the world while being full of homeless, or has the strongest army in the world while having the shittiest healthcare of all developed countries?
Because liberalism, I/E shrink the state so that ~the corporations can rule~ the invisible hand of the market can fix everything.
Even Adam Smith recognised that you need a state to limit the power of the big actors in the invisible hand of the market.
So, a regular Tuesday in Argentina. You grow insensitized to it through the years. Last time I got surprised (and laughed hard at the evil genius) was when last administration kept the conversion rate artificially low, but created a tax for buying dollars for saving.
> Just please let’s do better lunches than milanesa con papas next time, deal?
Fixed exchange rates are effectively an import subsidy. This staves off the problems of massive price spikes in things like petrol and medicines, but devalues the (already struggling) exports. At least Argentina is self-sufficient in food.
"In Brazil, there is a frequent rhetoric about “we don’t want to become like Argentina” or “this politician will turn us into Argentina”. So I was left wondering: how bad is it over there really?"
In the 80s Brazil, there was a TV ad from Orloff vodka[1] where the guy talked to future-himself. The catchphrase was "Who are you?" "I'm you, but tomorrow".
That was it. Every news outlet started using the term "Orloff effect" to scare viewers and readers about brazilian government policies that would, in their opinion, inevitably make Brazil become an Argentina.
Readit News
The other thing to note is that Mastercard (and Visa I believe) have a newer rate specifically aimed at tourists (the MEP rate), which normally stays closer to the informal rate (blue dollar rate). Annoyingly they tend to charge your account with the official rate, and then refund the difference a few days later.
There's also this website which has a view of all the different rates: https://bluedollar.net/
It was super sketchy. When I sent the money, the western union person said there was a chance western union would block it because it was such a large amount, but luckily it went through. When my sister picked it up, they basically stuffed it into a backpack to carry around. Seemed very dangerous to be carrying that much cash (even in the US it would be), but it worked out ok.
Constant GDP per capita is up ~50% from 1960: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDARG
The GDP of the rest of the world went up a lot more than that [1] - and Argentina never did anything besides have decent weather and a roughly constant amount of fertile land.
It's kind of like a Dutch Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=eMGt
Now they would usually be cramped in a city where the effective cost of living is much greater (leading to villas), whereas their GDP and thus income didn't grow much.
1) I used to work in a very large IT group in Latin America, and I worked with some EngManagers who hired and managed some folks in Argentina. One interesting dynamic was due to the inflation, we used to give to folks 'monthly' salary increases to offset. Since the company captured the inflation also in the prices, for a long time offer that offset with a small plus was a very huge retention factor for us;
2) After 2015/6, our IT director started to give 1 Bitcoin or USD 500 equivalent in Bitcoin for our argentine colleagues as part of their monthly salary, and eventually those guys ended up holding or selling it with more than 10x over it.
Not sure how Argentinians are supposed to do better using cryptocurrencies.
They could just search € or USD, which they do :D But the government used to have a cap of 200$ per person and month to exchange (not sure if that still happens now with Milei)
It got some upvotes, but sadly no discussions at all. Highly relevant when discussing Argentina at the moment though, but keep in mind this is just one extreme perspective, one side of the coin so to say: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39436291 (https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/javiermileiworldec...)
Milei's bark is likely to prove more extreme than his bite, of course. He's already pointedly not abolishing the central bank and quietly mending relations with China.
We are driving our future off a cliff by allowing collectivism to return over libertarianism.
For example his perspective would be very consistent with the perspectives of the founding fathers of the United States. The Founding Fathers would have widely agreed with the speech’s support for free-market capitalism and its critique of collectivism, socialism, and excessive state intervention. Advocating principles that promote economic freedom and prosperity would resonate with them as a reflection of their own efforts to create a government that promotes individual liberty and economic opportunity. celebration of the entrepreneur as a hero of prosperity and its warning against state overreach would likely find broad support among the Founding Fathers. They were, after all, establishing a new nation built on principles of liberty, property rights, and opposition to tyranny. The speech’s call for economic freedom and limited government intervention mirrors the Founding Fathers’ debates on the proper role and size of government. Many of the Founding Fathers, like Alexander Hamilton, would likely support the speech’s endorsement of free-market capitalism. The emphasis on economic freedom and the role of free enterprise in lifting people out of poverty would resonate with his and similar Founders’ views on economic development.
Yet somehow this is generally considered the majority opinion today of his speech:
> has pretty strong and "out of the ordinary" opinions and ideas
There is a lot of distance between promising economic changes and getting a positive outcome. His path seems to include a lot of reducing income to the government, privatization of government services and shuttering government branches that promote sciences, etc.
I think he wants to recreate Alabama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Javier_...
https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=Argentina
(advise: skip all other random talk about AI, LLMs and ML stuff, you may easily get outraged)
I don't see anything worth reading here. It is deceptive with intent and fundamentally unhinged.
But I disagree with "I don't see anything worth reading here", even if it's unhinged and you fundamentally disagree with their point of view.
He is the democratically elected president of a country in despair, and trying to understand what will happen to the country requires understanding the motivations behind the actions, which are laid bare in his speech, no matter how factual his points are.
In Brazil we have a saying "pior que tá não fica", which translates to something like "it cannot get worse than this". Belive me when I say this: it can (and probably will) get worse. It can (and probably will) get SO MUCH worse.
We tasted this poison with 4 years of Bolsonaro trying to get away from the establishment. What did we get in return? 700k brazilians died to COVID, we now have a huge anti-vax problem and after the piece of shit lost the election he attempted a COUP. Luckily he's going to jail on the next few months, but the damage is done.
Perhaps. But it might not be the kind of maturity that comes from 40 years of witnessing what politician promises are worth.
There are never politicians that ought to be adored.
That's the problem though. It's completely understandable to vote against that. But to have one option to the status quo, and that option is this?
It's basically like you have lived beyond your means for a long while and you live in a too big house and the sensible solution might be to get another job, sell the car and move to a smaller place. But see that choice doesn't exist. Your choice is to keep aggregating debt, OR you burn the house down and live in a tent.
The problem with very bitter medicine like this is that it risks swinging back the other way just as fast when people become angry enough.
Deleted Comment
LMAO like the previous twenty years didn't exist eh?
Signed: an Argentinian
That sounds like a common world problem, not anything specifically Brazilian. In my country of 11 million (including Ukrainian refugees), we've had 45 thousand deaths. And anywhere where people frequent Facebook, the anti-vax movement thrives. It is not even specifically far-right, a lot of the crowd belongs to the organic green bio-mom milieu. I can't even begin to count all the middle-aged ladies in colourful ethnic clothing who hate vaccines based on very flimsy arguments.
The coup thing is fairly unique, though.
Before the pandemic I personally never saw a single person denying vaccines to their children. Our health system had one of the most successful vaccination programs in the world, we were nearing 100% rates on a country with a scale of continent. Since Bolsonaro our rates are dropping on a very alarming rate and on the streets you see people trash talking vaccines all the time, even solved diseases and infections are returning because of this.
And about the 700k deaths, a lot of studies have been published proving that if the piece of shit bought the vaccines earlier hundreds of thousands of lives could've been saved, or if he did not made a public campaign AGAINST the vaccine we could've saved countless lives.
Not as much. It was heavily inspired by the events in the USA.
Currently we have a successful but pretty crappy form of capitalism. Some countries have experimented with Communism, fascism, oligarchy (ism)?), feudalism ect ect.
Why not give libertarianism a shot?
Things weren't regulated for a long time, and that's why there were literal snake-oil salesmen blowing literal smoke up your ass while their 10 year old kids worked 7 days a week. It was only around the 1900s that we really started regulating things -- and for good reason.
Because it's capitalism on steroids? Are you not aware of the world we're living in? Every major forest destroyed, countless species exctinct, climate change reaching point of no return, etc.
We urgently need to slow down, not speed up.
Because liberalism, I/E shrink the state so that ~the corporations can rule~ the invisible hand of the market can fix everything.
Even Adam Smith recognised that you need a state to limit the power of the big actors in the invisible hand of the market.
You'll soon see.
> Just please let’s do better lunches than milanesa con papas next time, deal?
Science hasn't made that breakthrough yet :)
Fixed exchange rates are effectively an import subsidy. This staves off the problems of massive price spikes in things like petrol and medicines, but devalues the (already struggling) exports. At least Argentina is self-sufficient in food.
In the 80s Brazil, there was a TV ad from Orloff vodka[1] where the guy talked to future-himself. The catchphrase was "Who are you?" "I'm you, but tomorrow".
That was it. Every news outlet started using the term "Orloff effect" to scare viewers and readers about brazilian government policies that would, in their opinion, inevitably make Brazil become an Argentina.
1. https://youtu.be/r5-Tsp1nLJU
Milanesas are a godsend tbh though
(search for images about 'self service brasil' for instance)
But to be honest: empanadas > milanesas
I think we are simpler fellows regarding food but we enjoy them a lot :P