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Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

I just filmed a small thing with a local videographer in Egypt.

I asked him how he protects his savings from the recent inflation, and he said gold and real estate.

He does local work but tries to also do a lot of freelance gigs for international people paying in dollars online. The dollars get converted to local currency by his bank, but at least his income keeps up. Most Egyptians have income denominated in local currency, and if the local currency gets cut in half relative to the dollar, it is not as though they get big raises to keep up- they just make fewer dollar equivalents going forward. Unit anchoring bias works against them. But people who do foreign work just keep charging the standard dollar rate so their income goes up a lot in local currency and remains basically flat in global terms.

#BrokenMoney

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Joe 2y ago

Are the IMF-mandated devaluations a restructuring or refinancing event of a loan to the Egyptian Central Bank?

Those two spikes seem insane when you see the trend line of the EPs exchange rate for $1.

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Lyn Alden 2y ago

These are restructuring+refinancing events. Egypt needs dollars to service its debts, and the IMF offers them under certain conditions, including a major currency devaluation. Egypt also has to privatize a few billion dollars worth of assets to raise some funds.

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