On Jul 15, 2015, at 8:27 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <[email protected]> wrote:
> Turns out that Yves Smith is a Goldman-Sachs alumni like me. She agrees > totally with my drachma automation post and put it up on Naked Capitalism. > Lots of interesting comments there even if most are uninformed. Columbia > University, which had a pretty good IT infrastructure for a nonprofit, spent > a year analyzing Y2K conversion tasks and then a year testing it. And all > that was involved for the most part was looking for program code that was in > an mm/dd/yy format and modifying to mm/dd/yyyy. > > http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/07/convert-to-the-drachma-piece-of-cake-right.html Louis, I don’t have the technical expertise to judge, but this piece does seem to contradict your assertion that Greece is incapable of converting to the drachma because “billions of dollars would be required to do such a conversion and the cash-starved government agencies would even have less money for such a project than private corporations”. Those interviewed suggested the government could immediately issue IOU’s linked to the remaining stock of euros held in its reserve coupled with a keystroke digital conversion of euros to drachmas in private bank accounts. The electronic circulation of the currency for tax payments and trade would then gradually be followed by the printing and introduction of banknotes over an extended period of a year or more. Quoting from the article: "The government and banks could work together to convert all bank deposits from euros into drachmas, either overnight or over a set period of time. Practically speaking, this would mean a person with 100 euros in their bank account on Tuesday could find that they instead have 100 drachmas in their account on Wednesday. There wouldn’t be any physical drachmas available yet, but the money would exist digitally…If the Greek government resolves to push ahead with its drachma currency, it would eventually have to print banknotes and coins. The process of designing and printing new banknotes would take at least a year, according to Bernd Kuemmerle, who is head of the banknote business division at German-based Giesecke & Devrient, a leading global banknote producer.” http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/07/news/economy/greece-drachma-currency-cash/ Frankly, I find it difficult to accept, with great respect for your previous experience as a computer programmer, that you have uniquely have discovered a fatal technical flaw in converting to the drachma that many currency experts in the universities, central banks, international agencies, commercial banks, and investment houses have not. Their concern seems to be less the technical aspects of the conversion than the exchange rate at which the new drachma would settle and the danger of runaway hyperinflation. Here opinion is frequently coloured by the politics of the observers. This piece from Fortune magazine is less alarmist than most: http://fortune.com/2015/07/06/greek-drachma-conversion-euro/ Yves Smith, BTW, has no more of a technical background to my knowledge than we other lay people. She worked, as you may know, on the investment banking side of Goldman-Sachs, not in the IT department as you did. Finally, for those who happen to live in the Ottawa, Ontario area, there is a protest against the imposition of the latest austerity package at the EU Commission, 185 Metcalfe (below Laurier) at 5.30 this afternoon. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
