On 7/17/15 9:15 AM, Patrick Bond wrote: > Was it genuinely impossible to arrange a Grexit given complex logistics > of introducing a drachma?
I don't know why I keep having to point this out but the conversion to a drachma is not the issue. ATM machines can be stocked with newly minted bills within a month. Instead the issue is transforming a nation's IT infrastructure to handle the new currency. It is ACCOUNTING systems, TRADING systems, PURCHASING systems, etc. that have to be retooled. It took YEARS for the drachma to euro conversion to be implemented within such systems. What makes you think that it would not take years to reverse engineer? Just one example. Computer systems are almost certainly filled with logic that is looking for some hard-coded value such as "if order_amount > 1000, then perform order_limit_rtn". If a new currency makes such logic inapplicable, then chaos will ensue. The basic problem is not in and of itself technical. It is more a question of business systems analysis, the first stage in a project life cycle. I had been involved with both the business and the technical side of such projects for more than 40 years, including a number that crashed and burned. For example, I spent 3 years designing an account management system for Goldman-Sachs. Not a year after this system, which was part of a suite of new IBM mainframe software to replace dated Burroughs based software, management realized that it was already behind the curve and began a new major project to adopt Unix-based client server systems. Large-scale DP projects are marked by delay. Let me repeat that. Delay is typical in any major undertaking. When management used to tell us that they expected something up and running in 2 years, we always understood that it would take 4 years. In my view, the only people who get this are Yves Smith, who managed large scale DP projects even though her background is primarily on the business side, and Nathan Tankus whose dad has a background like mine. In addition, Nathan is very much on top of the "interface" problems involved with a currency switch. This is very hairy stuff. _ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
