FuckyWucky [none/use name]

Pro-stealing art without attribution

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Cake day: March 21st, 2023

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  • If fuel is supplied through state enterprises, the state can essentially set prices and recapitalize from budget as needed.

    The supply shock then manifests as the currency weakening and other imports becoming pricier. This works as long as the country has sufficient foreign currency sources (exports, capital flows, remittances).

    Foreign currency reserves can help outbid other countries too for existing oil without affecting exchange rate.

    Unfortunately, even in countries where oil corps are owned by the state (e.g. India), the state is unwilling to allow these enterprises to run losses in local currency (“sound” finance). Good to see Malaysia is holding the line for now.

    The state can do this even without nationalizing but theres greater risk of fraud, arbitrage if private sector is involved.

    Though at the aggregate subsidies doesnt create more oil, countries outbid one another, if all countries do this, oil prices get pushed up in Dollar terms too.

    I’ll say it’s a good thing the US isnt doing this since its one of the largest consumers and US in particular can outbid countries without worrying about exchange rates, large countries should let fuel prices go up slowly and compress demand instead of keeping it fixed.






  • Yep it creates a lot of bad incentives. For example, corps and individuals borrow in Euros or Dollars at 5-10% or whatever hoping the Central Bank will pick up the rest by maintaining crawling peg to help pay back the debt.

    When it turns out the central bank can’t and the exchange rate crashes, the debts become unservicable ie currency mismatch.

    So never raise rates to higher double digits especially when you have loose capital controls and fixed exchange rates.

    And the typical solution of “just lower rates” becomes more complicated too since private sector is still stuck with massive foreign currency debt even if Turkish central bank lower rates. And because a lot of Lira was created due to high rates which now flood the foreign exchange market.

    In case of Turkey, the >100% then 70-80% rates of the 2000s destroyed Lira credit market that makes it very difficult to switch back to low rates (that’s why Erdogans low rate experiment failed). In an economy with low stock of foreign currency debt, floating exchange rates, low interest rates wouldn’t cause runaway depreciation like what happened in Turkey.

    India is one of the few developing countries which has a low interest rate (5.25%), floating currency. And now they are planning some stupid nonsense like Dollar indexed Rupee bonds to curb depreciation (not even that high) which is happening due to a supply shock it has little control over.