How Fake Money Saved Brazil

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake-money-saved-brazil

by nl • 16 years ago

377 131 16 years ago

frossie• 16 years ago

"He said, 'Well, I've just been named the finance minister. You know I don’t know economics, so please come to meet me in Brasilia tomorrow,' " Bacha recalls.

So, three things had to happen:

1. A politician had to admit his ignorance

2. Some bright spark technocrat somewhere had the right solution to a seemingly impossible problem.

3. The right politician asked for help from the right technocrat

They're not kidding. It is a miracle.

rbanffy8• 16 years ago

I can tell you it was a really remarkable time.

The only minor inaccuracy is that we only impeached one president.

gamble2• 16 years ago

It only works the first time you try it.

Afterward, everyone with a stake in the country's direction realizes that having a technocrat who shares your views and has personal access to the administration is a great way to influence policy. The money spigot opens, and pretty soon having the 'right' opinion is far better for your career than independence. Survivor bias eventually ensures that the technocracy is dominated by people with the 'right' opinion.

And that's when you'll know that your country has achieved parity with the United States.

rbanffy8• 16 years ago

> It only works the first time you try it.

Once for every generation. Don't overestimate people's ability to remember.

Besides, if you do it correctly, you only need to do it once.

I don't trust the current favorite candidate to keep doing it right, BTW.

sethg3• 16 years ago

If you’re a politician, it’s easier to admit your ignorance when your five predecessors who claimed to know what they were doing got brutally mugged by reality.

rlander• 16 years ago

And it definitely felt like one. You have no idea how much the country changed (for the better) because of this improbable miracle.

Nobody believed it would work because the whole country had lost faith in "magical" economic reforms like the one before it, the Collor Plan.

Imagine you wake up one day and all of your bank accounts are frozen - that's what happened to my parents (and most of the population) on March 16, 1990 when the Collor Plan was announced. It's your money, but you can't spend it - sorry. My father had been saving money in order to buy a new house. Years later he recovered less than 1/10 of the original sum. Lots of small businesses (including family and friends) went broke.

When I talk to my parents about pre-real days it feels like they were born in a different country than I was.

yardie• 16 years ago

Wow, I guess that explains the uptick in the brazilian population in South Florida during that time. One year of school I only knew one brazilian kid on the bus. The next year over half the bus was brazilian. Big migrations like that usually happen because of economic reasons or war. I just never put 2 and 2 together until now.

ricardo_sdl2• 16 years ago

My father lost some money because of Collor Plan too. I'm 25 and is hard to imagine how my parents went through those rough times.

Asdfg2• 16 years ago

There is no such thing as a "real value" as measured in a vacuum. Value only comes in relation to something: a commodity or a basket of goods. What they did in Brazil was to establish a new currency which the government promised not to inflate, then as inflation destroyed the previous currency, the way was open for the new one. This is how inflation was ended in Weimar Germany, post-WW2 Hungary, '90es Serbia/Romania/Russia. Only Zimbabwe handled things so poorly that the national currency vanished completely.

Even if people learn the value of their inflating money with respect to more stable things, inflation STILL eats away at the value of their savings. It does them no good to learn prices are stable (with respect to an arbitrary standard) except to learn they are indeed getting poorer.

Also, freezing bank accounts and banning the trade of foreign currency only makes matters worse. People not being able to access their money does make them poorer still.

1. You can't inflate at leisure without destroying the currency. 2. You can't have a peg to a foreign currency if you keep inflating faster than that currency's central bank. 3. You can't then cover up for the misdeeds of the government by denying people access to their savings.

swombat• 16 years ago

Of course there is no "real value". However, inflation is not solely the result of the government's wishes to inflate the currency (as examples of hyper-inflation obviously show).

Inflation is also simply in the minds of the people using the currency. If everyone expects high inflation, and keeps raising their prices to match their expectation of inflation, then inflation will happen - the raising of prices will ensure that. And if you try to fix that by force, as you pointed out, the inflation accelerates even more, because it's now happening in a black market with even more waste.

The way they fixed inflation in Brazil was, it appears, by changing people's expectation of what should happen to currency. They had to get everyone to believe that the brazilian currency can be stable. The mechanism they used to do that was the cheap trick of creating an alternative currency and calling it "real". It may be a cheap trick, but from the look of it, it worked.

tkeller4• 16 years ago

"Brazil's inflation rate hit 80 percent per month. At that rate, if eggs cost $1 one day, they'll cost $2 a month later."

Really.

noelchurchill2• 16 years ago

It's like this article was written by a high schooler.

rbanffy8• 16 years ago

I am an engineer. I frequently do such approximations ;-)

For most uses, like prices of eggs, it's close enough.

panacea• 16 years ago

I think you need to listen to the audio podcast version before you disparage the style of exposition they use.

The Planet Money folk unashamedly try and explain economic current affairs and stories as simply as possible. It's essentially their self professed raison d'être and they do a good job of it.

Quibbling about the the accuracy of their simplified examples is missing the trees and the forest.

sahaj• 16 years ago

it's a close enough approximation. isn't it?

tkeller4• 16 years ago

It is, certainly. My only issue is that it wasn't treated like an approximation.

wallflower• 16 years ago

Rule of 72

Divide 72 by the periodic interest rate to find the number of periods to double the money.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

Great rule, should be the very first thing taught in high school when you get to exponents.

Dr. Albert Bartlet of University of Colorado has an excellent lecture on its implications for population growth, environmental degradation, and other big picture problems:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

enko• 16 years ago

Funny you mention that "rule". It's not very accurate, and becomes less accurate the higher the inflation/interest rate goes.

I just worked it out; at 80% inflation it would take 1.18 months to double, not 0.9 like the rule of 72 would suggest. That's a fair difference, and certainly more in line with intuitive expectation.

Not that the OP isn't being overly finicky. Both round to 1, and only one significant digit was given anyway. But still.

flatline• 16 years ago

I just listened to this story on the radio and I distinctly heard them say "about $2 a month later". This could just be a transcription error, as it was produced for radio first.

chrismealy• 16 years ago

The article never mentioned it, but it's a called a wage-price spiral.

anodari• 16 years ago

It's a 100% real story. I lived in these days. I had to put a feature called "currency change" in my softwares because every year we had to divide by 1000 all values in databases. One major work was to adjust fields sizes because currency values are allways causing data overflow.

rbanffy8• 16 years ago

> we had to divide by 1000 all values in databases

Those were the days!

It's absolutely impossible for me to say how much I paid for my first car. I know it were 4000 monetary units, but I cannot recall its name nor how much it cost. That's weird.

brc3• 16 years ago

It's an interesting story but the frightening thing is the comments of people wondering out loud what's wrong with inflation, or asking for more inflation in the USA.

Out of control inflation is a terrifying, society-destroying phenomenon. Stable and prosperous societies rely on stable money values.

KiwiNige• 16 years ago

A friend of mine who lived in Peru around this time told me that when he got paid he would literally run as fast as he could to change the money to US$ because the longer he took to change it, the less it was worth.

guelo• 16 years ago

True but there is also such a thing as money being too tight which is the current situation in the US.

swaits• 16 years ago

Money isn't tight in the US. It may not be flowing as much as it once did, but it's still loose and cheap.

sethg3• 16 years ago

The people who are asking for more inflation in the USA are asking for something in the 2% range, or (for those who are truly bold) asking for prices to rise to the level they would be at if inflation had remained in the 2% range for the past five years or so.

Stable money is good, but so is providing people with an incentive to spend and invest, rather than incentives to hoard cash and default on their debts.

diego_moita3• 16 years ago

Sorry, but this is playing with fire.

What scientists, technocrats and economists forget is that public policy is rarely driven by rationality. It is driven mostly by private interests, demagoguery, blind ideology, prejudice and the public misconceptions.

The idea of taking a little bit of a very dangerous medicine is something that no one should take lightheartedly.

brc3• 16 years ago

The party was had, the hangover must be endured. Bad investments were made, they must be liquidated and written off, and these are deflationary.

True inflation (not the manipulated government statistics) is really a measure of the market. To say that inflation is at the wrong value is to say the market is wrong. The Fed has been striking matches for a while now trying to get inflation to catch on and stand by with the wet blankets when it starts to get out of control. The banks are stuffed full of cash but don't want to lend. If they throw any more fuel onto the fire it might catch and spread faster than they can deal with. Then it's the 1970's all over again and your lifetime savings are decimated in the space of a few years.

People believe that more inflation is needed, then you believe the market is wrong and more intervention by central powers is right. It's ok to believe that, but I'll never agree. High inflation punishes the savers, lenders and investors, and rewards the speculators and borrowers.

I'll admit, my investment strategy is biased towards a breakout of inflation. But that's because I believe the central banks are so wedded to the idea they won't let it go, not because I agree with them. You can't double the money supply in under 2 years without a flow-on effect, even if it's not immediate.

Experimentalist4• 16 years ago

We already had way too much government investment encouragement with artificially low interest rates for years. People do not need more incentives to spend. btw, we still have rockbottom low interest rates.

What happened in this crisis is over-investment and over-supply. That waste needs to be rolled back and we need to get back to a balanced budget - which is what Brazil did - it's not even mentioned in that article all the strict fiscal policies Brazil enacted like a balanced budget amendment!!!

The easy money policy causes businesses and people to borrow money they do not have (debt) in false expectation of future profits/income, and they spend money wastefully because they think they have more than they do have.

Now people must save and recapitalize and pay off debt. Some bsinesses must fail. Real estate prices must fall. Public expenditures must be reduced.

People are NOT hoarding cash. Ridiculous. Businesses are saving because look ahead and they know rates will have to increase and the hardships are not over. They are are borrowing at low rates in expectation of higher rates in the future (it would be more expensive to borrow in the future when rates rise)

noahc2• 16 years ago

What are the implications of this for startups?

Has a startup ever benefited from using a fake currency? In what ways?

rbanffy8• 16 years ago

It's a very interesting story of out-of-the-box thinking at country-scales. Most impressive indeed.

It's about gaming the market. It really drives the idea that the market is only a shared somewhat consensual hallucination.

noahc2• 16 years ago

Which would explain lead investors and other ideas about market signaling.

It also explains recent posts on lying on stage and PR efficiency.

dstein• 16 years ago

Inflation is a useful tactic to make RPG style games addictive.

I worked with someone who built a popular facebook RPG game, and part of what made it popular was that as you became an established player the amount earned per day rose exponentially. As the game became more and more popular the virtual economy started to hyperinflate almost out of control, and the established players started hitting the MySQL integer limits. The author never expected that would ever be possible, but the exponential rate of inflation plus the exponential rate of new players joining created a giant pyramid scheme.

limist• 16 years ago

Good story, reminds me of a favorite quotation: The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. — Albert Bartlett

ricardo_sdl2• 16 years ago

This reminds me of this: http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part4.ph... Because of a bug in the game, everybody could duplicate items with no cost and everybody became extremely rich in the game.

csomar• 16 years ago

It's a matter of governement control (assuming your are not connected to the outside world/Internet and don't have, therefore, a real-time currency update).

Let's assume gov. X, printed an additional $3bn. Will prices increase? No, they won't. The gov. can use this money, to do things, like building roads, schools... These expenses has to be considered as investments; if roads are built, industry will benefit and exports will increase lowering the inflation that the gov. had already made.

So the gov. can print as much papers as they want. It's paper in the end. But the ROI of the money they spent/printed, is going to decide if inflation will happen or not (in the future).

If inflation is spiking, it means the gov. lost control over the banking sector and a new currency needs to be made to return confidence to people and companies.

bd_at_rivenhill• 16 years ago

The government could do things like building roads, but they are usually just using that extra paper to pay off their debts, which makes investors demand a higher interest rate to hold the debt, which leads to a vicious cycle. Inflation is caused by the speed of money creation exceeding the speed of creation of real value, and the banking sector is not the only actor in the money creation process.

coliveira• 16 years ago

That was the problem in Brazil, money was created not to invest but to pay existing debt.

dzorz• 16 years ago

80% per month sounds crazy, but it is not even close to top 6: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Worst_Hyperinfla...

pavlov• 16 years ago

Heh. I always assumed that the name of the currency, real, has the meaning "royal". Instead, it's literally the same as the English word. What an interesting story.

Have any other governments suffering from high inflation tried this?

Instead of calling it a fictional unit, they could also just use an existing currency like the euro for the transitional period, then switch to a new national currency that has an initial exchange rate of 1:1 against the euro. (I'm picking the euro because it has a fairly neutral image, with over 20 countries using it already.)

wmf• 16 years ago

I would assume that the Brazilian real is named after the Portuguese real which does mean "royal". It is an odd name in a democratic country, though.

Qz• 16 years ago

Not totally odd considering Brazil started out as an Empire (after independence).

sportsTAKES• 16 years ago

You are correct that 'real' means royal but it also means true or authentic (similarly in English).

I think that probably more accurately describes their intention behind the meaning of the name.

When I lived in Brazil in the 1990's, shortly after the currency changed from Cruzeiros to reais, the exchange rate was around 1.5. Today, it's 1.69 - there have been some relatively mild fluctuations since then but it has stayed remarkably stable.

brianbreslin• 16 years ago

you mean somewhere like zimbabwe trying this? It would be particularly tough since they have 1000% monthly inflation or some other insanity.

i don't think zimbabwe has enough control on their economy to pull this off.

quadhome2• 16 years ago

Zimbabwe doesn't have a currency anymore.

They gave up and went to nationally accepting the dollar (USD), pula (Botswana), or rand (SA).

Helped things a lot. :-)

dctoedt• 16 years ago

> use an existing currency like the euro ... [which] has a fairly neutral image ....

Opposition politicians looking for ammunition to attack the plan -- correction: looking for ammunition to attack the incumbents; they might have had little interest in attacking the plan otherwise -- would denounce the insult to national sovereignty.

That's surely why Brazil called it the URV - unit of real value - instead of admitting that in effect they repriced in Yanqui imperialist dollars. That's not in the linked NPR transcript but was mentioned in the longer NPR Planet Money podcast, linked at the bottom of the transcript.

lkjuhygthyujk4• 16 years ago

I believe Germany did in the late 1930s but for other reasons the Reichmark didn't quite end up as the world currency they wee hoping for.

You can decide to peg your currency against a more stable one eg west Africa and the French Franc - but unless the owners of the hard currency have some political reason to support your then you have to persuade the world's traders that you flobble-bead is actually worth a Euro.

eru3• 16 years ago

Germany did introduce the Rentenmark to replace the Paper-Reichsmark in the mid-twenties to stop hyperinflation. (Later on they--essentially--reverted the name of the currency back to Reichsmark.)

There was no hyperinflation in the 30s. The early thirties saw depression and deflation. This Weltwirtschaftskrise lasted longer in the US than in Germany and is known as the Great Depression, there. The crisis contributed to the rise of Nazism in Germany, though.

devmonk3• 16 years ago

Hopefully the U.S. won't ever have to deal with this type of issue (out of control inflation). I'm very surprised that inflation hasn't hit the U.S. yet in a big way, but from what I hear that is because China and the U.S. are buying U.S. treasury bonds in a big way.

cbernini3• 16 years ago

but the big problem for you guys is: it's expected that China holds something around 1 trillion of the US GDP in treasury bonds. So whenever they feel the US economy isn't trustworthy anymore, selling these will hit like a train.

their growth rate is really high right now, so it's a delicate situation.

rglullis• 16 years ago

The problem is not even in selling. They would need someone to sell to. Once China stops buying it will be the beginning of the spiral down in the prices of US bonds.

China is the only emerging market that needs the US economy going and for the American consumer to keep its purchasing power. China can only stop buying when their domestic market gets big enough to sustain the hit that it will eventually come.

gamble2• 16 years ago

The Chinese can't stop buying bonds if they want to keep their currency depressed relative to the dollar. Moreover, they have no intention of stopping the gravy train - tanking the US economy (further) would only hurt their own largest market, and no other large market is as willing to accept one-sided trade and currency policies as the US.

asmithmd1• 16 years ago

The Fed bought up 1 trillion in mortgage debt and no one blinked -- that is why mortgage rates are 4%. If China started dumping their T bills the Fed would just buy them up. It wouldn't hit like a train -- more like a tricycle.

nl2• 16 years ago

Why on earth would inflation hit the US?

Leaving aside the oh-shit-we-are-all-fucked scenarios (ie, collapse of trust in the US currency or maybe another 70's era oil shock) what on earth could cause inflation at the moment?

Sure, your interest rates are low, but domestic demand levels are so low that everyone are desperately cutting prices to try and create some demand. Combine that with very high unemployment and it's simply not a high inflation environment.

I'd be more worried about deflation than inflation at the moment.

devmonk3• 16 years ago

Because the U.S. has "printed" plenty of money in the past two years and is going to "print" some more:

http://blogs.forbes.com/greatspeculations/2010/10/04/looking...

Adding more currency without backing is a sure way to cause inflation, I hear. How they've been avoiding this is by China and then the U.S. sinking money into U.S. Treasury bonds, I hear also. When the U.S. makes claims that the economy is not good (which they've done quite a bit), I wonder if they are trying to influence investors to invest in these bonds rather than stocks, or if they were really trying to warn us that something bad is coming. Either way, as a consumer, I'm worried.

meric• 16 years ago

Wow. Last night I was thinking... if I was a supermarket manager in an inflation-ridden country, how would I save money by not changing price tags everyday? And my answer was to set one of my products as "1 Unit" and just price every other product in multiples of that "Unit". That way I only had to change the price of a single product!

And then today I read this! What a coincidence! I never would've thought you could scale up this technique up to do it to the whole country!

ataggart• 16 years ago

During the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, grocers dealt with this by changing the organization of their stores. Instead of grouping like-kind items together, they grouped like-priced items, then they would just bump the prices for each aisle.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

That is certainly one solution, but what happens when the government puts a limit on how much you can charge for bread?

The best solution is the one my current supermarket uses - the price tags on the shelves are a cheap LCD display, so all they have to do to update the prices are to push the new prices from a database.

noonespecial• 16 years ago

So they used the real, which was fake, to make the money that was real fake, so they could make real money out of the fake real.

Dr. Seuss would be proud.

yannk• 16 years ago

"From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere!"

I have been introduced to this masterpiece by reading some of the books to my daughter and it's a real delight, apparently as much for her than it is for me.

I wish I had these books where I grew up.

michael_dorfman• 16 years ago

Dr. Seuss would be proud.

Or Baudrillard.

swah• 16 years ago

An extra level of indirection?

Reminded me of the quote: "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection"

jjs• 16 years ago

"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection" —Butler Lampson, quoting David Wheeler

tkeller4• 16 years ago

"... except for the problem of too many layers of indirection." (David Wheeler's corollary)

anthonyb2• 16 years ago

...except too many levels of indirection.

barrkel• 16 years ago

I think you can solve that, to some degree, with a cache (if it's performance that's troubling you) or a simplified facade (if it's the complexity of the deep stack).

Yes, those are indirections.

diego_moita3• 16 years ago

The article doesn't tell lies, but it certainly spices up a lot the story. Some points to clarify:

* The "finance minister who knew nothing about economics" was actually a very respected sociologist, a senator and a very intelligent and skilled politician. He later became known as president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. I.M.O. one of the best 3 presidents this country had.

* What Edmar Bacha, Pedro Malan and others did was to break inflation's inertia/momentum. A lot of people already knew it was necessary; but no one else knew how to do it.

* The article doesn't comment on the strict and cautious monetary policy implemented by Fernando Cardoso. It was as much important as the "fake money" trick.

* Big inflation was a huge tax on the poorest people. Because they were poor, they didn't have the knowledge and means to protect against rising prices. It is because inflation ended that they began consuming more and the country increased their internal markets.

[Edit]Wikipedia has a more comprehensive explanation about what we call here Plano Real : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano_real [/Edit]

cbernini3• 16 years ago

It's also valid to mention that the impeached president also ended up helping out in one way: he froze the saving accounts, since one way to stop inflation is to cut down the buying power of the population.

diego_moita3• 16 years ago

That is what classic theory says and, in truth, for a brief period of time, inflation receded when Collor (the impeached) froze savings.

However the fact is that it recovered back again to high levels during Collor's mandate.

The cut down in buying power was achieved mostly through fiscal policy, not consumption restriction.

nandemo• 16 years ago

Diego, thanks for the much necessary clarification.

Besides the monetary policy that you mention, Cardoso also implemented a stricter fiscal policy. There's no way they could have defeated hyperinflation without cutting government spending. He also continued the trend -- started by the previous administration -- of opening the economy (slashing the tariffs, etc) and privatizing state companies.

Experimentalist4• 16 years ago

Also I believe a balanced budget amendment was enacted in Brazil around that time.

forinti2• 16 years ago

The most important aspect of the plan was that all the triggers that were put in place to automatically raise prices, tariffs, and salaries were turned off.

These were the biggest producers of inflation and were what made Brazilian inflation unique. It was a sort of administrative inflation.

butu5• 16 years ago

wonderful article.. I really love it :) it raises lots of question how this is possible, how many people get impacted.. Anybody did any significant financial loss?? or few people know about this able to take any benefit?? but this is definitely a bold decision and executed well towards result..

winter_blue• 16 years ago

There's no such thing are fake money, only false promises. Money is debt on the side of the government. Fake money therefore, is debt that the government defaults on.

varjag2• 16 years ago

Anyone here who experienced post-Soviet currency collapses would instantly remember prices in У.Е. ("convention unit", in reality a legal way to put U.S. dollar price tag), monthly re-indexed МРОТ ("salary unit"), and so on. Alone they did not help anything, until economy and fiscal policies fundamentally changed.

raquo• 16 years ago

Until oil prices skyrocketed, I'd say.

varjag2• 16 years ago

Inflation receded by 1996, well before oil prices went up.

barmstrong2• 16 years ago

I don't understand something about this story.

Hyperinflation is primary caused by government printing money right? So if switching to another currency helped stop this...I get how it could help people changing their perceptions, but wouldn't the root cause be that the government stopped printing money with the new currency?

It seems like it would have been almost as effective if they had simply stopped printing more of the original currency until things stabilized?

Maybe I'm missing something. But the article seems to put too much weight on this clever idea of shifting to a new currency. While if monetary policy had stayed the same with the new currency I don't think it would have made any difference. The monetary policy here was the important part, not the new currency.

quadhome2• 16 years ago

I had the same question. The Wikipedia article on the URV lead me to "Inertial inflation."

In the medium-to-long term, economic agents begin to forecast inflation and to use those forecasts as de facto price indexes that can trigger price adjustments before the actual price indices are made known to the public. This cycle of forecast-price adjustment-forecast closes itself in the form of a feedback loop and inflation indices get beyond control since current inflation becomes the basis for future inflation (more formally, economic agents start to adjust prices solely based on their expectations of future inflation). At worst, inflation tends to grow exponentially (leading to hyperinflation).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_inflation

barmstrong2• 16 years ago

Interesting, thanks for posting that (it is probably what the author is basing it on)...although it's probably more accurate to call this one theory of how it could happen.

The reasoning behind it doesn't fully make sense to me.

Simple reason: people spending money as fast as they can (the shot in the arm that can accelerate hyperinflation) has a natural limit: when people have no more savings! So I don't think it's correct to call this a positive feedback loop. It has a natural limit that could be reached quite quickly under hyperinflation.

Indexes can only takes things so far too - if you (as a business owner) follow them and nobody can afford your products, you'll quickly figure it out and drop prices. So it seems weird to say indexes could cause hyperinflation over any medium-long time frame.

acqq• 16 years ago

In Yugoslavia in nineties during the big hyperinflation everybody was calculating the prices in German Marks, still hyperinflation progressed until the specific political decisions happened. I also consider the article as such an oversimplification that the real insight is actually lost.

motters• 16 years ago

All money is of course "fake" in that it only has value if people believe that it does. Economics could be thought of as a branch of psychology, with "real value" being connected to the transient and sometimes hard to quantify needs, wants and desires of people.

sethg3• 16 years ago

...and now that Brazilians are no longer so spooked by inflation that they spend money as soon as they receive it, three Brazilian banks are among the world’s top ten credit issuers. (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329294/life-on-...)

One liberal wonk wonders if this is a sign that the country is facing a consumer debt bubble. (http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/tomorrows-credit-b...)

known• 16 years ago

Will this trick work in America?

patrickgzill• 16 years ago

It is coming to the USA. It is called the SDR.

How Fake Money Saved Brazil

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