Prices, value of the dollar and new rates of public services, are some “numbers” with which the finalists will be surprised when they leave the house
By Damian Di Pace
28/03/2023 – 13,00hs
There is a saying that says that Argentina is a country where if you go on a trip for 20 days, when you return everything changes, and if you go on a trip for 20 years, when you return nothing changes. This could be abstracted to the case of the program Big Brother where the participants entered in October 2022 and left at the end of March 2023.
How much could we learn from Big Brother about Argentine macro and microeconomics? The program had an audience record from the beginning until the end of the contest. Suppose that each of the Argentines had participated in Big Brother without contact with the outside world living in the house from October 2022 to the end of March 2023.
What would they find regarding their basic economic references?: neitherincome level, prices, value of the dollar, inflation, reserves in the Central Bank, prices of public service rates, new tax provisions and country risk, among others.
Fair prices, inflation, dollar before and after Big Brother
When you entered the house, you were at the beginning of the Fair prices, which for six months had changes. Diapers in October 2022 cost $555 and in March 2023 they cost $854, generating a price difference of $298. If we had bought sausages in October 2022, it would cost us $313 and now in March 2023 it costs us $478, a difference of $164. The Fair Prices program had its adjustments and outside of it the gaps and price differences reach 35 percent.
When the participants of Big Brother left the house and arrived at their own, they found out about the increase in utility rates between October 2022 and March 2023 with different adjustment guidelines and segmentation by socioeconomic level and consumption levels.
For his part, he public transportation suffered increases in 6 months of more than 40%. In turn, cell phones or a fast food combo suffered increases of more than 40% also in the same period.
The British writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley expressed that “Life is a puppet of time to the extent that it changes at every moment, it changes the inner and outer world so that we are not the same two instants in a row.”
In Argentina, the outside world and the economy do not know two consecutive moments of sustained continuity and constancy in a time line. It is deterioration, uncertainty, change, worry and lack of understanding and references permanently.
The macroeconomic variables also deteriorated while the members of Big Brother were inside the house with the peso devaluing against the dollar up to 30% in its financial versions.
He Risk country it didn’t improve much from when the members first set foot in the Big Brother house until they came out dropping just 41 basis points.
Las reservations of the Central Bank they are worse than 5 months ago and the drought at that time was not even a reality. The only constant in time is the external constraint of the economy. There are unapproved SIRA (System of Imports of the Argentine Republic) and containers waiting in Customs without sufficient dollars for access to the Free and Single Exchange Market of the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic to enable import operations at the exchange rate official.
Six months before the entry of the participants to the house, the economy accumulated an average price variation of 35%. When leaving the house, the inflation accelerated and accumulates more than 40%. In turn, most of the members of the house will know for the first time in their lives what an average inflation of 100 percent is.
Any Argentine citizen in just six months saw how their level and quality of life changed. By taking a subway (step from $30 to $42) or a bus ($23 to $32). If they go to the supermarket there were increases of more than 50%. The rates of public services had constant readjustments. Rents and private services increased above expectations.
Argentines outside of Big Brother also experience daily isolation
Argentines without the need to enter the Big Brother house live in daily isolation why they are losing the basic references of the economy. In the blink of a light, inflation evolves, wages lose, poverty grows, the value of the peso falls, the dollar appreciates, services correct their prices, monetary issuance advances, local debt increases, the official dollar advances and the tourist dollar moves at the same intensity, the reserves of the central bank deteriorate, the country risk advances.
we live in a daily loop with weekly evolution every time we leave and enter our house in this Big Brother that is the Argentine economy and politics that subjects us to the same rules of the game managed by unscrupulous, liars and deceitful politicians worried that at the end of the contest everyone will issue the I vote so that the only ones left inside the house are them.
The rest of the Argentines out of the house with their same rules of public spending, fiscal deficit, monetary issue, inflation, devaluation, loss of purchasing power of income, poverty and growing indigence comor variables of a permanent “loop” of the less “spoiled” story of the “spoilers” story.
