My god! Did you see the price of those shoes!
My father gave my three children a jar of pennies, and they were thrilled. We’d just opened bank accounts for each of them, and the credit union gave them a bunch of paper rolls, each to hold 50 pennies. They set out to count and fill, and soon they had $3 in pennies each. We went to the credit union and made the deposit, and they’re now watching their savings grow with the interest.
Mind you, this all happened at a credit union in the U.S., my homeland where we were recently on holiday from where we now live in Argentina. You give a bunch of pennies to a U.S. bank like Bank of America or JP Morgan Chase and they’ll charge you a couple of bucks or more to accept them, hold them and then withdraw them. Many credit unions don’t have monthly fees or heinous charges. The costs are for your own mistakes like going overdrawn.
All of this also happened in a country where inflation is pretty tame at 2.2% annual. [click to continue reading…]
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"Let's go girls!" - A warm-up for the presidential victory dance.
MY ELDEST DAUGHTER is in with the times in Argentina. She’s just declared that she will run for president this October, probably against Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the current president, and seasoned politicians like Elisa Carrio and Eduardo Duhalde, and a few relative upstarts like Ricardo Alfonsin, Francisco de Narvaez and Mauricio Macri.
My daughter is seven (“Almost eight!” she reminds me) and has a preliminary list of campaign promises that she’s developed from her years of living in Pinamar, a beach town in Argentina, and in the capital of Buenos Aires, and from spending weeks and weeks in my hometown of Los Angeles and her mum’s English countryside near Lincoln. [click to continue reading…]
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Big fish, big price. Inflation is a killer.
I REMEMBER AS a kid the time when chocolate bars jumped from a quarter to 50 cents. It seemed like the price went up without reason, and with it my life changed. I was too young to know about economics. But it was easy to figure out that I now needed twice the coins to buy a Baby Ruth or a pack of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in my home town of Los Angeles.
Inflation is again pulling the rug out from under my life. I live in Argentina and inflation here is like water. You’ve always got it. And it can rush. Inflation was steady between 1975 and 1991, and went hyper several times, the last in 1990 before the government could get things under control. It did so with policies that largely wiped out local industry. The peso was tied one-to-one with the U.S. dollar and inflation turned into deflation. But shopping got as expensive – or more expensive – than in London and New York City. I saved my money to shop on my trips to Los Angeles and Europe, filling suitcases to take home to Buenos Aires. I got more for my money outside of Argentina. [click to continue reading…]
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