I’ve lived 27 years in Argentina and this is a great summary of what inflation is about.
When I was a kid, my grandfather always told me, “this country doesn’t change anymore, generations change, presidents change, but what happens today will happen tomorrow, and what we want to happen today will probably never happen”. I, my grandfather being a saint of my devotion, still didn’t believe it. I didn’t like the idea of thinking that this was hopeless, that there was no chance of saving the country. I thought that thanks to the fact that my family had the good fortune to work all my life, that I had the necessary education to form myself, and a plate of food, or more, on the table every day to eat, that it was impossible that over the years the same things that my grandfather complained about, would be present in my daily life. That is why we study, that is why we train, that is why we help people in need.
Maybe the fact that I was younger and idealistic contributed to that thought, but soon it was going to be proven that many of the things my grandfather said were true. He used to tell me that to get home from work, he had to get on the train through the window because there was no other way to get in. 25 years later, on my way to work, I found myself getting on trains through the window. He told me that in the ’80s, you would go to the supermarket one day in the morning, come back in the afternoon, and the prices had changed. Obviously, always up. 25 years later, I had to experience getting used to an inflation standard NEVER below 30%. I was assured that all the money I saved in my life, the money I saved for birthdays, for special days, the money I earned working, I had to convert into US dollars, because the Argentine peso was never going to be worth anything. I thought, how skeptical my grandfather is. Today he is no longer around, but every time I got my Argentine salary and wanted to save, I followed his advice for the simple reason that he was right in every word he said.
Many of us are the young people who have been educated (or not) and want to change the country, but it is very difficult to change it when you have a corrupt system where the only way to enter is to play the game that others play. The game of the exchange of favors, the fact of taking something in exchange for doing some activity. The desire of young people is present, but there is a wall that is too big, too high, and too obsolete to break down. Consequently, what many of us end up doing is to leave. We go far away from our families to look for a better future, where our abilities are appreciated, or many times we start from scratch, in order to avoid working in Argentina hoping for the same thing to happen.
But something is changing little by little, people are waking up and realizing that the system cannot continue to work like this. Young people are understanding that there is a separate system, where the government does not stick its nose in, where it is impossible to control the flow of money, because there is no politician who can print it, and even, we end up entrusting all our money to an algorithm, rather than to the Argentine State. The reasons are many, and date back even before my grandfather was born in Argentina. But the consequences are visible today, in the streets of Buenos Aires, in the stores, in the cafes, you see people talking about cryptocurrencies, about Bitcoin, getting together to make a P2P transfer, creating and making communities to change the course of the country once and for all. And to me it’s something that makes me proud. Because I saw with my grandparents and my parents, how the Government took all the retirement money they worked for all their lives, to finance campaigns and things that no one cares about but them, but this is something that absolutely no one will be able to take out of our hands.
