As said, folks, what's happening in Greece at a micro level is worth carefully studying for future reference. When the US dollar hyperinflates, you are likely to see very similar behaviour. Indeed what you're seeing in Greece matches closely with how people behaved in past currency crises of a similar nature - look up an old, old book called
Blockade by Anna Eisenmeiger, which was a diary of going through hyperinflation in Austria between WW1 and WW2.
http://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/g...7445303142
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USE it or lose it — that’s the plan for many Greeks, who have been going on a credit card-fuelled spending spree out of fear their savings could be confiscated or devalued.
This is a microcosm of what happens economically in hyperinflation. Greeks are spending on their credit cards because once serious inflation hits, credit simply will not be offered at all - because in hyperinflationary conditions, lenders cannot work out what the interest rate is or should be. Anyone offering loans in hyperinflationary conditions is bound to lose money.
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Wary of the experience in fellow eurozone member Cyprus two years ago, when deposits were seized to recapitalise banks, Greeks are opting to drain their accounts by electronically paying taxes and bills — or buying luxury goods.
Don't be surprised when Greece does something very similar to its own citizens. As for the idea that the banks will reopen? Very doubtful at best. Something similar happened in the US in the Great Depression: FDR slapped a bank holiday on to stop people getting their money out. Something like 6,000 banks across the country closed their doors that day. A good 2,000 or more never reopened them.
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“Up to last weekend, people bought a lot of things to protect their money,” confirmed Andreas Triantaphylidis, vice president of the Association of Athens Merchants.
Between June 27, when Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced a referendum that made his eurozone creditors boil, and July 10, when speculation peaked that Greece could crash out of the euro, luxury products have been flying off the shelves.
Sales of expensive goods such as watches and jewellery and electronic items like smartphones and computers leapt 30 per cent compared to the same period last year, Triantaphylidis said.
On one hand, the behaviour of people buying up expensive consumer goods is superficially smart. If you've got your money in consumer goods, you don't have to trade on the government's shit currency. On the other hand, this is actually a penny wise and a pound foolish, because expensive consumer goods like this -- and like gold ingots -- are not easily divisible into smaller proportions. You could easily find yourself having to hand over a 6,000-euro watch for a bag of potatoes. Someone who stockpiles the same value in small, divisible quantities -- for example, buying a case of cigarettes or a couple of slabs of alcohol -- is going to be in a better position since they can barter much more easily, bit by bit; a few apples for a pack of cigarettes, a side of beef for a case of alcohol, and so on.
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Some 500,000 credit cards were delivered in the past few days, helping push card transactions up 130 per cent, according to the Association of Greek Banks.
If so, then Greek banks in general are even more fucking stupid than I gave them credit (ha ha) for. Those banks are not going to see a single dollar of those transactions repaid to them in real terms.
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“Last week, we had a lot of clients. They wanted to buy all they could, for fear of losing half of their savings,” said Stephanie, a saleswoman in a family-owned jewellery store in the capital’s up-market Kolonaki neighbourhood.Jewellery made of gold, a traditional safe-haven metal, and luxury watches, some of which cost up to 6,000 euros, were snatched up by “not especially rich” customers aged 30 to 50, the 28-year-old employee said.
“Greeks: I don’t understand them. Me, I’d never spend my money in these times,” Stephanie added.
Stephanie, likely a middle-class Greek woman who hasn't had to scramble in a currency crisis before, is about to get an object lesson in what happens to the middle class in such crises: it is
devastated. Anna Eisenmeiger, in the book
Blockade, was a doctor's wife in Austria: the urban upper middle class. By the point where she abandoned her diary in sheer despair, she had lost all of her money, her home, and had lost a nephew to starvation.
Make no mistake: in inflationary or hyperinflationary conditions, you either hold your goods in assets not denominated in the currency you want to avoid, or you get rid of the shit currency you hold as fast as you can. In hyperinflationary Germany, employees would be paid twice per day - and on being paid those employees would invariably
run to stores to spend the money and thus get rid of their cash, because their money literally devalued in the time it took to get to the store.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm