What is a dollar?
In The States, it is the smallest bill before breaking up into coinage. We have denominations from 1 to 100 and it has been that way for years.
The dollar is also used world-wide, at least for now. Other countries still use it and the ones that have devastating inflation rely on the dollar as a store of value.
Here in Argentina, there is a daily quote on dollar prices. The official numbers are false. It is impossible to buy and sell freely at that number but the government created it so that other countries would not be aware of how fatal the peso's inflation has become.
The blue price is the unofficial price of the dollar (in pesos). It is the real price at which the dollar can be bought and sold. Some say it is the black market price but one would have to be able to purchase dollars at the official rate, in quantities, for that official price to be considered real. In other words, you would need a market before you could have a black market.
They call it the "blue dollar" as if the dollar were changing, but it is actually the value of the peso which is falling, not the price of the dollar that is going up. More about terms we use below.
The average price for $1 hit a thousand ppesos today. As it turns out, the largest denomination we have (readily available) is the $1,000 pesos note. So in essence, we are paying all our gas, electric, rent and clothing with singles.
That is fine if we are talking McDonald's where you would be eating for seven or with dollars. I had a burger the other day and paid $8,000. The math is now easier than before - eight bucks = eight thousand in funny munny.
What if you want a new suit or even a used car. A three thousand dollar car here would be 3,000,000 pesos and cash payment would require counting out three thousand of the largest notes (1,000 notes). I know you can't empathize with our plight. Cash is not used much in the west, but imagine paying for a $3,000 car all in one dollar bills. Pretty silly stuff!
I never go out without a hundred thousand in my pocket. When I change out dollars or crypto for local currency, I usually get over a million in pesos. Very funny. Soon we will be loading up cash into shopping karts or wheel barrows in order to go out for dinner like they did in Germany some years ago.
Just three weeks ago, $1,000 usd would fetch a half million local cabbage. Today that same 1k is a million. The strangest thing of all is that the people here do not accept anything but pesos. Why would you want more of something that loses its value so quickly? I still cannot talk them into accepting bitcoin or other alt coins. Well, a few do, but when the others protest, they want higher wages (still want pesos and more of them).
Terms
Nothing we use correctly describes most things we talk about. The "blue dollar" tries to convey that the dollar has changed in some way when the opposite is true. When we talk about "inflation" that word means the prices are going up. Devaluation would be a better word. Milk and gasoline are not more valuable - they have not changed.
We are being misled constantly. For example when I heard there were wild fires in Hawaii were anything but wild. From day one, they say wild fires and people automatically assume there were no weapons used. Then people are unable to even think the true nature of a think.
I have learned that when they add, "widely debunked" in the headlines, we can be sure that they are about to finally mention the truth and assure that we will not believe what they are about to talk about.
And finally we have the things that are "safe and effective" but have turned out to be anything but. The last time people were so fooled by propaganda, the man with the funny mustache was running things.
So the blue dollar is really the shrinking orange k-note, the wild fires are the DEW fires, the improving economy in the U.S. is really a depression, and the other false adjectives they place in news articles are their way of leading us to blame the wrong people for our problems.
