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Comment by GFischer | Hacker News Reader

Argentina is also taking a lot of other extreme measures to combat inflation and flight of capital, like not printing money, leading to a shortage of coins for example; and severe restrictions on exchanging pesos for dollars, hurting tourists and imports. Newspapers even report the paralell exchange rates!

I suspect there will be an economic crisis in the next few years, and it will hurt us Uruguayans as usual, we're already feeling the pain of export restrictions and now they want to restrict services and software which will direcly affect several friends and colleagues.

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Would you mind explaining the downvote? I friggin live here and I KNOW they are printing more money than ever.

Their modus operandi is basically this:

- Take money from the middle class through unconstitutional high tax rates (that never come back in the form of infrastructure, education, security, etc), so they become poor.

- Give money to the poor so they keep voting favorably

- Give money to already rich friends and the Congress members, to have more power

- Get crazy laws approved, so that middle class has no escape. Eg: We can no longer buy other currencies, not even gold, so we are forced to stick to the pesos.

- Print print print! (more pesos) This way the money flows like this: people's savings and salaries -> government

- Profit

They are printing a lot of money, but they are not printing $ 400 or $ 500 bills, that is what we need. About 50% of the bills in the street are $100 bills, which doesn't make sense. Printing bills with a higher denomination would be a way to officially declare that there is, indeed, inflation.

Source: http://www.losandes.com.ar/notas/2011/7/6/mitad-billetes-cir...

ps. I didn't downvote you; I don't think it matters anyway

Seriously? Not printing money? Inflation does not come from people's imagination.

Sorry, I was thinking along the lines of loboman's argument, but I was probably wrong.

What they're not doing is expanding the supply of coins and large denominations (500 peso bills for example).

Edit: loboman's link says that they're not creating new coins and low denominations:

"falta de numerario de baja denominación que se traduce no sólo en los problemas de cambio y devolución en las operaciones comerciales, sino también, en el deterioro de los papeles de baja denominación"

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