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Microsoft Just Gave Brazilian Consumers A Stunning Inflationary Wake Up Call
Day after day, investors hear about "foreign currency impacts" on earnings... which are dutifully shrugged off by pandering protagonists on mainstream media - "if you just ignore the currency effect, everything is awesome."
Well the truth is - unless you have lived it and seen it, you have no idea of the massive impacts that a soaring dollar (and collapsing currencies across the emerging markets - which every firm still believes is the engine of global economic growth).
So here, for some terrifying clarification, is Microsoft's latest product pricing announcement:
So - for various countries from Russia to Brazil and from Algeria to New Zealand, while maintaining its USD purchase price, Microsoft has adjusted its loal price "to reflect fluctuations in the currency exchange rate."
In the case of Brazil shown above as an example - the local price of a Microsoft product just went up from BRL 6.5 to BRL 10.3...
That is an enormous 58% inflation in local pricing!!
How would you imagine that will affect local demand? And this is happening in every country and for every US corporation's products.
* * *
Is The Fed about to hike rates, sending the Dollar even higher, and simultaneously crushing global demand?
h/t ForrestM
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Just charge it to your USD based Visa card.
lol...doesn't really help if your earnings are in Real's. Hey! I made one whole Dollar last week! No you didn't, you made .27 Real, a little over twenty five cents.
Keynesian statists are masters at this kind of shit ;-)
No, but it sure as hell reinforces the notion that one's savings shouldn't be in a currency subject to those levels of exchange rate risk.
Granted for now even gold is looking pretty crappy for storage based on the USD strength, but that won't last forever either. I suspect devaluations among fiats will last forever (or go to zero.)
WOW! I'm glad that Linux doesn't charge for their software.
Come to think about it, they don't have backdoors either.
Interest Rate Cycles In Review - Are We Ready For The Next Installment?...or why if people and corporations didn't use credit at ZIRP would they want it at higher interest rates???
http://econimica.blogspot.com/2015/11/interest-rate-cycles-in-review-are-we.html
Well according to Bitsters & Keynesians currency is only what you think it is, from digits on a screen to sea shells. But to your point, I prefer to know the exact location of all my past boating accidents as we all know, paper fiat has an intrinsic value of exactly...zero.
I mean, ALL paper fiat is sooo valuable (lol) that the best & brightest economic banker minds now want to ban it, basically admitting what we already know ;-)
We are kind of living this now - retired living outside the US.
Perhaps we have moved 1/3 our cash local - where it is true it is getting beaten up at the moment versus the dollar - but it is earning 3-4 % - and it is HERE. And - except for when we visit US based companies (like Costco) there really doesn't seem to be much inflation.
If the dollar stays strong for a long time - it will not be good for the US. But I'm not an economist.
I think know what you meant (and no offense intended) but I'm not sure if others did, if your card is being replenished with dollars it works out fine. A Brazilian earning in Real, it doesn't. A Brazilian earning in dollars, also does...provided they have anything left over after BOTH countries get done taxing the shit out of their earnings wherever they earned them...lol.
It's not just paper value that goes down.
The Romans continually debased their currency, which at the time was gold, silver, copper, bronze, as time went on, to "make" (print) more money so the government could "pay" for handouts.
anopheles, congratulations!
this is your first rational, intelligent, factually accurate comment i've seen you make on zh.
keep up the good work.
in the New Economics, the correct answer is "just charge it to your great- great- great granchildren's Visa card"
I think I'm right in saying that many or most Brazilians don't even have international credit cards, let alone one that's denominated in USD.
From my substantial experience, they are even down to paying for their supermarket shopping over 3-4 payments using either a store card or a credit card which allows a similar arrangement. No interest charged.
The signs in Brazilian shop fronts and on notices inside (clothes, shoes, white goods, household stuff and most everything else) which say "Paga em X vezes, sem entrada, sem juros" are everywhere. "Pay in 5 times, no deposit, no interest" are ubiquitous.
Brazukas are up to their necks in short-term debt.
addendum:
I forgot to mention that when Brazilians use their international credit card abroad for anything, they are charged a Brazil.gov tax of more than 6% on their statement.
The evilness of a socialist government.
lol.
I keep laughing when I think back to the summer when the Fed.said, " The strong $usd isn't one of our primary concerns when deciding interest rate policy."
It looks like the Fed. is getting the best of both worlds. A collapse in tier-2 economies from higher borowing costs, and a kick in the ass from the stronger $usd on lack ofU.S. exports.
It really makes you wonder if it isn't deliberate instead of incompetence, they couldn't fuck up the world more if they tried.
If someone was evil and they were doing crazy shit, would they rather you think they were incompetent or evil?
People actually pay for MS products?
Windows 10 was Fah-REEEE!!!!
In fact, it would try to install itself without one's approval in some instances.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/windows-10-upgrade...
Indeed.
They'll get their money back when they begin charging for usage of it.
This is where M$ are heading: pay-per-usage with the op/sys and apps only fully functional if you have an Internet connection and are registered to pay.
and who the fuck uses a MS product when linux is free and works just as well or probably better...?
To those comparing Linux, don't be stupid. Tho example is about large scale cloud based storage for businesses.
The world is not all revolving around icrap, Linux distros and operating systems. There is a huge spectrum of products that are only available by real productivity companies and being used by engineering, retail, other companies out there...
http://cryptome.org/nsakey-ms-dc.htm
If Linux left the backdoor open for the NSA for instance, you could check the source code yourself.
I didn't downvote you, but you need to made aware of something.
A majority of the web servers out there run Linux. Almost every single computer in the top 100 fastest supercomputers on the planet runs Linux. *Every* Mission critical piece of software (Air traffic control backends for example) runs a unix derivative - that being Linux or BSD. Bloody ell even Microsoft run more than one Linux back end data stores. Funny how they chose to store the information they gather on you on a platform that isn't even theirs.
nidaar - you are an idiot...ever heard of red hat? enterprise?
Yep, I couldn't agree more.
I run linux on all my machines now. Using dedicated Nvidia GPU with my multi-monitor systems.
I just bought some new stuff with Win-10 and immediately partitioned the hard drives for linux installations. I'll keep the Microcrap for emergencies, but I have WINE installed on my linux machines for running NTFS/windows based software.
Hi Linux groupies, sorry to spoil the M$ hate-fest but there are plenty of reasons to run Windows, it just depends on your use case. Their developer tools are first-class compared to what's available on Linux (gdb/eclipse wtf), Java is a sorry competitor to the .NET framework, and yes, you're locked in - the flip side of which is that there are STILL plenty of applications that don't run on Linux or suffer performance issues under WINE.
Agreed. There's a linux fan club of people who swear by it.
But I sometimes wonder how many of them only use them as Internet terminals, or do they do real computing on their machines. I do quite a lot and many of the programs I use under Windows simply will not run under linux. Apart from that, I have test run a half dozen linux distros and none of them, not even Mint, cut the mustard.
Linux simply is not ready for Prime time. I wish it were...
Those Ivory Tower Fucks don't know up from down but they are gonna raise rates in December so we have to deal with it .....
fuck micro soft
Well central bankers have been trying to ignite inflation looks like they finally suceeded as far microsoft products are concerned,
Not a problem - wages in Brazil went up 58%, right? I mean they must have, right? Anybody?
Bill Gates & Warren Buffet as the crony-socialists they are, are in fact more equal than the common Brazilian socialists.
Didn't you get the memo? ;-)
+1 more :-)
Smacker, we could point out the blatant, crony-socialist, criminal hypocrisy of Warren "Tar Sand-Railroad Engineer" Buffet and Bill "Backdoor NSA-I Got Mine" Gates from now until doomsday but the left will never get it.
Its like their brain freezes up, they close their eyes, stick their fingers in their ears and scream LALALALALALALA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU! like the little children they are.
Absolutely. Here he is revealing himself:
"The Real Bill Gates"
lol...but but but...he's gonna give all his ill gotten gains away...AFTER HE DIES!!!
And some people eat that shit up with a spoon.
And he also gives speeches advocating eugenics, but carefully avoiding any mention of the word.
This guy is pure evil and has done more to damage the humble Personal Computer with his rotten op/systems and crappy application s/w than anybody. The history books will record that Windows peaked at XP Pro. Since then it's been downhill all the way. And his current plan is to dumb-down the PC so it will become little more than a terminal that requires an Internet connection and payment profile for the op/sys and app s/w to fully function.
So letters people write using Office will first have to login and they'll be stored in the Microsoft Cloud (for easy access by NSA). You don't have an Internet connection: So sorry, the s/w won't fully function, can't create or save anything etc. S/w updates will happen whether you like it or not.
It goes on ... :-(
Just how exactly is Brazil going to hold the Olypics next year?
Borrowing from the Central Bankers of course in exchange for their natural resources of course at the expense of the nation of course. See Greece for more information of the topic and how the mechanism works in EuroSlaveLandia.
Now you can see how gold and silver function as a "purchasing power mechanism"; anyone in Brazil whose savings were in PM's are just fine.
I think you'll find that the Australian government told me that devaluation of the Aussie dollar was a good thing for the Aussie economy, so the joke's on you ZH. (I sure hope that the price of imports continues to skyrocket.)
I suspect demand at the higher prices will crater. And Microsoft, if it desires any revenue from Brazil, will have to lower its prices.
Do Brazilians buy Windows? Here in Russia, buying Windows is one of most bizarre things. People use distros from the Pirate Bay. No one knows Microsoft's prices, and no one bothers. Once I'd got a licensed version with a new brand laptop, but it sucked so hard that I had to install cracked one.
"Do Brazilians buy Windows?"
Same as everywhere else. Some buy, some pirate.
But bear in mind that most retail PC laptops and desktops are sold with Windows pre-installed, as you experienced. It's very difficult to buy a new laptop in the UK without Windows pre-installed with those wretched hidden partitions etc. And no recovery disk supplied of course.
It took me virtually a whole day to replace the HDD with an SSD, transfer the Win7 op/sys on to it and get it to boot up.
But bear in mind that most retail PC laptops and desktops are sold with Windows pre-installed, as you experienced.
In my country, you can return pre-installed Windows and get money back but it's not an easy task. So you're right, laptop people use the pre-installed OS. Desktops are mostly custom made here so you can select the OS to install.
"It took me virtually a whole day to replace the HDD with an SSD, transfer the Win7 op/sys on to it and get it to boot up."
Yeah, I had the same experience last year. The blue screen, wtf, googling, downloading third party tools, and so on to just switch drives. My linux system for banking (Windows is too dangerous) lives on SD cards, pendrives, HDs, SSDs, even on CDs and DVDs, and it's totally free. Only windows-only software for my job keeps me on Windows now (tried to use in Wine but with little success).
Brasilians don t give a shit for original Microsoft. Every street corner there is a fake Microsoft. Let the Gov run Linux and that s it.......No more trouble....Melinda and Bill can have time to use Indians as guinea pigs for their vaccines.....Shamone Mofo...
I don't know shit about computers but read any article with the word Brazilian in its title. Needless to say, I'm disappointed - again.
I met a Brazilian talking about inflation there about 1 month ago, but no discussion of root cause, or how people are trying to protect themselves. Is there a good story on what is happening to that economy somewhere?
Brazil is printing their own currency and the exchange rate is reflecting this fraud.
Why isn't the USD exchange rate reflecting the fraud of Fed money printing?
Could it be that the artificial propping up of US Treasury Bonds serving as the 10% collateral in the derivative market, is not only supporting ZIRP but also keeping the USD exchange rate artificially propped up.
Brazil can't get away with this clever fraud avoiding instant punishment for money printing.