Speculation is the art of exploiting distortions in financial markets for profit.<\/p>\n
Most often, such distortions are caused by government intervention in the natural, dynamic system that creates all the wealth on this planet: The free market.<\/p>\n
Today, I want to highlight one example from the history of Argentina.<\/p>\n
In March of 1976, military dictator Jorge Rafael Videla came to power. He \u00a0immediately appointed Alfredo Mart\u00ednez de Hoz as Minister of Economy.<\/p>\n Mart\u00ednez de Hoz was a Cambridge alumni from a wealthy landlord family, the head of several major Argentine companies, and a close friend of American billionaire puppet master David Rockefeller.<\/p>\n Mart\u00ednez de Hoz set out to dismantle Argentina’s Peronist system.<\/p>\n In 1979, Mart\u00ednez de Hoz introduced an artificial system, regulating the exchange rate between the peso and the US dollar.<\/p>\n This was known as la tablita (the little table).<\/p>\n Because Argentina had large and ever growing foreign debt, la tablita overvalued the peso.<\/p>\n This made domestic products noncompetitive with imported products, so thousands of Argentine businesses went bankrupt.<\/p>\n However, smart speculators who understood the situation reaped massive profits with a simple carry trade.<\/p>\n This is called bicicleta financiera in Argentina (financial bicycle).<\/p>\n By getting low-interest loans abroad in dollars and earning exorbitantly high interest on pesos in Argentina, huge profits were made.<\/p>\n All completely risk-free because the exchange rate was guaranteed by la tablita.<\/p>\n And without any capital controls at all, these profits could then be freely moved abroad again.<\/p>\n Basically, the wholesale looting of the wealth of the Argentine people, thanks to their own government.<\/p>\n How is this story relevant today?<\/strong><\/p>\n The whole fiat currency system is one gigantic government manipulation of the currency market.<\/p>\n Fiat currencies, backed by nothing, only exist because of government decree. They are unnatural.<\/p>\n And this entire system is about to come down over the next few years.<\/p>\n It makes the decade of the 2020s one of the most interesting in financial history.<\/p>\n We’ll see crazy volatility, geo-political chaos, and the failure of many currencies, sending entire countries to the poorhouse.<\/p>\n All the while the solution is completely obvious.<\/p>\n But most people are too brainwashed and distracted to notice.<\/p>\n Cryptocurrencies are the antidote to the fiat money hoax.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.marcowutzer.com\/content\/images\/2023\/01\/Videla-Martinez-de-Hoz-Argentina-medium.jpg\")