• PasswordRememberer [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Buying yuan to protect my savings from inflation - super online commie dumbass move, or financial genius?

    Death to America

    • CheGueBeara [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      A good idea so long as you don't get locked out of it due to sanctions imposed by a flailing empire.

      • PasswordRememberer [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        I plan on moving to China eventually anyway so I should be good, right? Assuming I don't get locked out of that too

        Death to America

        • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I wouldn't count on that as a way of fleeing America. They issue a very low number of permanent residencies, but maybe that will change in the future.

          • PasswordRememberer [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            I don't need a permanent residency though. I'm just gonna teach English and vibe for as long as I can basically. Eventually I'll have to leave if I want to retire but who even knows if I'll live that long lol. Also if you marry a Chinese national and have kids you can stay in China until the kids are 18 even if you aren't a citizen, and where better to raise my hypothetical kids than china?

            Death to America

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Just because commodity prices are stable within a country, doesn't mean the relative performance of its currency to USD will outperform inflation within the US. Might be wrong on that, but it doesn't seem like those should be correlated necessarily, at least not very strongly.

      • PasswordRememberer [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Making up numbers for the sake of example:

        If 7 RMB buys 1 USD right now, and for the next 10 years USD inflates at 10% per year and RMB inflates at 1% per year, then by definition after those 10 years, 7 RMB will buy more than 1 USD, no? How could the difference between the two currencies' inflation rates not impact the exchange rate between the two? All else being equal of course - there are other factors besides inflation that impact exchange rates. Genuine question, I know nothing about finance, despite having gone to b*siness school

        Death to America

        • unperson [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          If 7 RMB buys 1 USD right now, and for the next 10 years USD inflates at 10% per year and RMB inflates at 1% per year, then by definition after those 10 years, 7 RMB will buy more than 1 USD, no?

          No, because price levels are not the same across countries and they don't stay proportional over time. Currently you need about 4.20 RMB to buy an equivalent basket of goods in China than what 1 USD buys in the US, not 7 RMB. This measure is the "purchasing power parity" exchange rate, and is usually below the nominal exchange rate for imperialised countries and above it for the imperialist countries. The OECD has a table of the PPP exchange rate for several countries here: https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm

          It's an essential part of the unequal trade relations that keep globalisation going. In practice, when you travel to China, you'll notice that you can buy twice as much stuff there than what you could back home. And conversely, a Chinese person travelling to the US will find everything twice as expensive. These relations can change quite rapidly, for instance in Argentina we had a PPP exchange rate almost on par with the nominal in 2015, despite persistently high inflation, when the government managed to turn the country into one of the least indebted in the world, but immediately afterwards a rightist government took the biggest IMF loan in the history of the institution, defaulted on it, crashed everything and now the PPP is three times below the nominal exchange rate, and again an American can come over here and buy everything, like in that scene from Eurotrip.

    • ElGosso [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Depends on the exchange value but broadly speaking it's a bad idea to hold a lot of currency in an inflationary economy anyway