Dollars To Pesos Quotes

way the government clears migrants from the trains in some places, spending millions of pesos and dollars to build those track-fences in Oaxaca and Chiapas and Mexico state, all while turning a blind eye in other locations.

American hurricane relief was strange. The United States sent no money. Instead, the following year, it outlawed all Puerto Rican currency and declared the island’s peso, with a global value equal to the US dollar, to be worth only sixty American cents.7 Every Puerto Rican lost 40 percent of his or her savings overnight.8 Then, in 1901, a colonial land tax known as the Hollander Bill forced many small farmers to mortgage their lands with US banks.9

Immediately after leaving the gate we encountered a bunch of raggedly dressed street kids. They blinked sad brown eyes and held out their hands begging for money, but we ignored them. Dan flashed us an accusing look, as if we were heartless bastards. He fished some coins out of his pocket, and tossed them to the children. A frantic mob of kids immediately overwhelmed Dan, hopping up and down, clamoring for money. Dan finally broke free from the grasping children, and we set off down the street. Suddenly, Dan stopped dead in his tracks, belatedly realizing his expensive scuba diving watch was missing. While we laughed and said, “I told you so!” Dan rubbed his naked wrist and stomped around the street in disbelief, bemoaning the loss of his watch. Then an innocent looking little boy timidly approached Dan. Obviously feeling sorry for the kind-hearted American, the cute little ragamuffin timidly spoke, “Mister, I know who stole your watch. Give me a hundred pesos and I’ll get it back for you.” Dan breathed a sigh of relief, thanked the little angel profusely, and gave him a hundred pesos worth eight American dollars. The little boy quickly scuttled into the crowd never to be seen again. We laughed so hard we were choking. Dan had just set a new chump record, losing an expensive watch and a hundred pesos all within minutes of leaving the base. We dragged him into the nearest bar to console him with cold San Miguel beer.

day to the news that the economy is back on track only to discover that there is less oil supply at our disposal than there was when demand started to fall. And it won’t be just the one-two punch of reviving demand and sagging supply that pushes prices up in a hurry. Once the genie of inflation is out of the bottle, it is going to take oil prices on a ride along with everything else. For one thing, there will be more money chasing fewer barrels in the world so the price will go up. And the dollars chasing that oil are going to be worth less and less even as the oil gets more valuable. Remember the Argentine peso and its 20,000 percent inflation rate? If a barrel of crude had been denominated in pesos, oil would have gone up 20,000 percent in 1989–90. If the United States wants to reflate its way out of recession, it is going to pump up the price everybody in the world pays for oil, since everybody pays in US dollars. If the dollar is worth less, oil is going to be worth that much more.

One particular incident had seared itself into Wences’s memory. In 1984, during the first major episode of hyperinflation after the Argentinian military junta lost power, Wences’s mother came to get him and his two sisters from school. His mom was carrying two grocery bags filled with money—the salary she had just been given in cash. She rushed with Wences and his sisters to the grocery store and had them run through the aisles, grabbing as much food as possible before the hyperinflation caused the goods to be repriced. A man walked through the aisles all day doing nothing but repricing the items on the shelves to keep up with the rapidly changing value of the peso. When Wences and his mother got to the register, he and his sisters would run back and grab more food if they still had any money left. Holding on to money was equal to losing it. These experiences gave Wences insights into the nature of money that most people in the world learn only from textbooks. In America, the dollar seamlessly serves the three functions of money: providing a medium of exchange, a unit for measuring the cost of goods, and an asset where value can be stored. In Argentina, on the other hand, while the peso was used as a medium of exchange—for daily purchases—no one used it as a store of value. Keeping savings in the peso was equivalent to throwing away money. So people exchanged any pesos they wanted to save for dollars, which kept their value better than the peso. Because the peso was so volatile, people usually remembered prices in dollars, which provided a more reliable unit of measure over time.

There was over five thousand U.S. dollars, as well as large wads of Canadian dollars, euros, Russian rubles, Mexican pesos, and six other currencies I couldn’t even recognize.

The first time I learned about Bitcoin was in 2013. I was living in Buenos Aires, reporting on the Argentine market for Bloomberg News. But I was more than reporting about it; I was also living it. As I wrote about double-digit inflation, the pesos I earned for those stories quickly depreciated. I started exchanging my salary to dollars as soon as I got it, until one day the president woke up and said, Nope! You can’t do that anymore.

Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that’s just the beginning.

Money is supposed to be a universal measure of value, rather than a token used only in some settings. But as more things are valued in terms of information, while being "free" in terms of money, at some point it becomes misleading to evaluate the wealth of individuals and corporations in terms of the number of dollars or pesos they possess.