Post: #1

Okay, so a while back WestCoast busted out an interesting data sheet on Caracas, where he went on the black market and got double the official exchange rate for USD, paying for his trip.

/thread-11046....=venezuela

With this in mind, I came across a reuters article where a run on U.S. dollars is happening in Argentina, due to inflation, etc. and a similar black market is emergining for USD in Argentina, by all accounts a much safer place.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/0...JA20120608

Quote:The near-impossibility of buying dollars at the official rate is driving some savers and investors to pay a hefty premium in the black market.

The question becomes, any players down there have any experience with this (if so what premium can we expect to get? and what other considerations do we need to take into account?) or is this just mainstream media nonsense?

Post: #2

I'm down in Buenos Aires right now, it is impossible to buy dollars at the official rate at the moment, so a black market has popped up around 6 months ago.

The black market change places are getting shut down by the day, so its difficult to make a list of places where you can get a good exchange rate, but once you're down here and ask around, it is not hard to find..since so many people are trying to get rid of their pesos.

There is a money transfer service that is available to those that have a us based credit, debit, or bank accounts that gives you an exchange rate of 5.63 - 1 while the official rate is 4.5 - 1. You can transfer up to 10,000 pesos a month with no problem, after that limit I hear there is lots of paper work. Here is the website https://www.xoom.com. It is fairly straight forward.

For those who have dollars the black market has helped to make things a bit cheaper down here, but even at 5.63 to 1, Bsas is not a bargain destination..who knows maybe in 6 months this place will blow up and the currency will be devalued but at the moment some US cities are cheaper than Buenos Aires

Post: #3

The crackdown n dollars is serious. The Argentinian are using it's intel agencies to go after the "arbolitos" (guys that sell the dollars on the black market. Here is a link from a guy that has since moved from Argentina. He has a survival blog. He talks about his experiences from the last collapse in 2000.

http://www.themodernsurvivalist.com/