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Saturday, July 10, 2010

Movie For Tonight: Argentina's economic Collapse "Memoirs of the Looting" (Memoria del Saqueo)

This movie illustrates many of the things that I often talk about here. I've posted links about it for sure before, but you can watch it for free here. Link
Its 60 minutes and it helps understand things better, gives a face to the topics we talk about.

FerFAL

4 comments:

Totalinvestor said...

Thank you Ferfal for the link, I was looking for this for quite some time.
This is a very informative film, and hopefully will act as a wake up call to many individuals.
I will have this posted to my blog for Monday for everyone to see.

Anonymous said...

Its difficult to believe that film given its obvious socialist bent.

Describing the 'Royal bank of Canada' as a 'British' bank was odd to say ther least. The 'nasty foreigners stole from us' is not explained, however the list of benifitors of privatisations were all Argentinians. The lack of facts and excesse whining about injustice was telling.

It does help explain the state that Argentina is in (well, after reading wikipedia to get some sort of real facts instead of socialist rants about 'treason'). Argentina is a basket case of a country it has been so for many decades. Pegging the currency to the dollar and the destruction of industry that it caused was just one step in the *many* steps of self destruction. What on earth made Argentians belive that they ever lived a great and rich country? The mindset is so flawed, based on the concept of entitlement and rampant corruption that it is a third world developing nation.

A country gets the leaders it deserves - 'A nation of idiots, with the TV and radio for idiots' to quote one commentator in the film. How apt.

Anonymous said...

Its difficult to believe that film given its obvious socialist bent.

Describing the 'Royal bank of Canada' as a 'British' bank was odd to say ther least. The 'nasty foreigners stole from us' is not explained, however the list of benifitors of privatisations were all Argentinians. The lack of facts and excesse whining about injustice was telling.

It does help explain the state that Argentina is in (well, after reading wikipedia to get some sort of real facts instead of socialist rants about 'treason'). Argentina is a basket case of a country it has been so for many decades. Pegging the currency to the dollar and the destruction of industry that it caused was just one step in the *many* steps of self destruction. What on earth made Argentians belive that they ever lived a great and rich country? The mindset is so flawed, based on the concept of entitlement and rampant corruption that it is a third world developing nation.

A country gets the leaders it deserves - 'A nation of idiots, with the TV and radio for idiots' to quote one commentator in the film. How apt.

russell1200 said...

Prior to 1808 (when Napoleon deposed the Spanish King, and put his older brother Joseph in his place), the Spanish Empire held together fairly well.

There was a lot of shifting of resources between the various colonies, and the various colonies had more trade between themselves than with Spain. But the Spanish King held the whole thing together.

With the Spanish King gone, the Empire started to fall apart. But unlike most other colonial rebellions, the locus of the revolt was external (Napoleon) not internal.

In addition, the Spanish Colonies seemed to always have had more of an extractive economy which generally leads to much less even distribution of wealth, and often leads to very uneven growth patterns.

If you add to this mix the many wars that the various parts of the Spanish Empire have fought between themselves, and the militarism this engendered, you have the makings of a pretty unstable mix.

Most of the mistakes Argentina made, seem to be the same mistakes that many other countries have made. The "Euro" is essentially a "pegged" currency. Some of the European Countries that are having problems now (Spain, Italy, Greece) have all had their past brushes with militarism and communism, and have all over spent their budgets on the basis of too easy lending regimes.

If Argentina can pull itself back from the precipice of el Duce style socialist-totalitarianism that they have been flirting with, they may actually wind up doing better than the Europeans.