GDP of $32b so 1.8% of their annual activity, invested in sovereign funds are in a high risk high yield asset class.
Fair enough. What the rest of their state financial asset investments are isn't clear: they've been doing smart debt recycling getting rid of high interest overhangs of being a basket case economy.
National exchequer isn't kitchen penny jar. I wouldn't personally invest in bitcoin because I don't like gambling and I'm content to live in an ETF world reflecting overall market trends, through my retirement fund. I wouldn't have a clue if they hold any and as long as it was a small % I wouldn't care much.
This represents less than 10% of annual government spending or revenue and less than 2% of their outstanding debt. It's cool, but not a huge deal at this point. If Bitcoin went up another 10x it would be significant.
Dumb questions: Are they going to sell? When? If not, what's the point?
Likewise, there is talk about people trying to get Trump to create a "strategic bitcoin reserve". Granted I have my biases against crypto/web3, but even trying to understand the argument, I don't get it.
> even trying to understand the argument, I don't get it.
It's not that hard to understand: The proponents of the proposal own bitcoin, if a big whale buys bitcoin the price of bitcoin will go up since the supply is fixed, and there's no bigger whale than Uncle Sam.
There's an innate human desire for gold. Humans crave gold so much that empires have been built and destroyed over it. That's a utility baked into the commodity. Many cultures hoard gold. Most of that gold will never be sold. Much of it is purchased for ornamentation and most of the time it just sits in a locker. In many cultures it is in fact considered a shame if family gold has to be sold.
Think of it this way - if there was no one to buy the gold from you, would you still buy the gold? Answer is yes. Many people all over the world would buy gold even if they could never resell it. The same can't be said about magic internet tokens. They have no inherent utility apart from the hope that a bigger fool will buy it from you at a higher price in future.
They recently (<2 years ago) arrested basically every criminal in the country and have the highest incarceration rate in the world by far. It’s a bit controversial internationally but the El Salvadorian people love it.
All I can say is visit now while it’s a well kept secret. I’ve never felt safer in a Latin American country. it’s beautiful, cheap and authentic. It feels like a country on the rise. While driving there it felt like everything was under construction (in a good way)
> They recently (<2 years ago) arrested basically every criminal in the country
I hope we can take their word for it, and they weren't abusing this power, because Amnesty International says they just threw huge numbers in prison without any due process[1]:
> The majority of the detentions carried out under the state of emergency were arbitrary because they violated due process guarantees through absence of clear judicial orders, prolongation of administrative detentions, lack of precise information from authorities to detainees’ families regarding their whereabouts, and concealment of the identity of the judges processing detainees.
Call me old fashioned, but I don't think it's necessarily awesome when the government just 'disappears' people and I hope that doesn't happen here.
So deeply ethically puzzled about the situation in Salvador that I'm linking it to the trolley problem.
Salvador could stay being one of the countries with the highest murder and rape, and kinda respecting human rights by following the presumption of innocence VS could put 2% of the population in jail to raise the quality of life for the remaining 98%?
I even heard someone say that Bukele proposed that any country that want Salvador to respect human rights for those arrested could just take the prisoners as refugees. (No source on that).
Which bring me back to the trolley problem, would you want your own country to take those ~75.000 people as refugee and consider them all as innocent?
> rights of innocent citizens come first and all other rights should be sought for after
In general, systems with this attitude (that rights are conditional on the goodness of the subject) wind up with a criminal at the top putting people they disagree with in jail.
That said, those effects manifest in the long run. In the short run, choosing autocratic simplicity is rational. It’s just that it explains why some systems yo-yo between corrupt autocracy and weak populism with islands of stability in between—getting liberal democracy to work takes patience and skill.
I think the gp would argue that they can, and in fact one of their selling points is that they can help avoid the erratic swings between corrupt autocratic rule and an impotent variety of populism.
They’re just harder to build and maintain: “get a better strong guy to strongarm the last strong guy who went rotten” makes more instinctive sense than “swallow the bitter medicine of compromise and spread power around.”
I’d go further: they have. But that requires both investment into those resources and patience. (Consider all the comments on even HN whenever wrongdoing is exposed confidently predicting there will be no consequences. Then, when they’re charged, that they won’t be arrested. Then that they won’t be convicted. Then that sentencing will be light. Then that it will get overturned on appeal. Now imagine the entire country thinks like that—there is no patience for due process.)
It’s more difficult for a poor country to transition to liberal democracy than benign autocracy. The only ones I can think of did so under occupation or in the wake of a traumatic dictator and/or civil war (see: Uruguay, India, and going way back, the United Kingdom).
When Juan Manuel Santos negotiated a peace treaty with the FARC, he won a Nobel. When Bukele makes El Salvador the safest country in the Americas, there are 'explosive accusations' of bribery.
Is it not functionally similar? Santos was defense minister during the Colombian False Positives scandals which was arguably much more evil than anything Bukele has done [0].
EDIT: the purpose of this comment is not to be pro-Bukele, but to encourage critical examination of the _framing and wording_ English-language publications use when discussing Latin American politics. As a Venezuelan, I am especially wary of authoritarians and you do not have to convince me about the slippery slope of judicial abuses of power.
No. Negotiating a peace treaty in which the gangs disarm in exchange for political participation versus paying them to be quiet for the moment are fundamentally different.
It’s analogous to the U.S. strategies in Germany and Japan, on one hand, and in Afghanistan, on the other hand.
> don't think it's necessarily awesome when the government just 'disappears' people and I hope that doesn't happen here
Disappearing means no paper trail.
These are mass arrests. Also problematic. But closer to a martial strategy than a civil one. But when you’re the murder capital of the world, maybe that’s merited.
It is a balancing act: If you follow procedure, you'll be too slow to make an impact. If you don't follow procedure, you'll throw innocent Pablo in jail, but your actions will make impact.
Politicians are specifically elected for this. Otherwise, you just put bureaucrats; because what difference would it make?
It’s clearly not an ideal situation. It might well be the start of something very dark. But also it’s worth examining how unserious some of Amnesty’s quoted claims are:
> lack of precise information from authorities to detainees’ families regarding their whereabouts,
Because the gangs will bust them out
> and concealment of the identity of the judges processing detainees.
It's not "old fashioned", I think you are being fed propaganda by these NGOs.
Sadly, same goes for a huge part of the mainstream media that becomes an echo chamber for them (Guardian, NYT for example that used to be reference of truth but lost that status).
Don't take my word for it, please take the time to read opposite views and try to honestly make your own opinion.
I didn't say it was old fashioned, I said I was old fashioned because I can't cheer for the government effectively 'disappearing' large numbers of people. In the US we've enthusiastically taken up arms against governments which did this type of thing. We have parades to honor people who died fighting against it.
Amnesty International isn't editorializing and this isn't a remotely controversial claim: the roundups happened via emergency powers which, by design, denied due process. It's not a secret, El Salvador wasn't trying to hide this.
The secret isn't that El Salvador is breaking human rights law, the secret is that El Salvador is an amazing place to visit and it won't break the bank. I can say first hand that Mexico and Ecuador have become sketchy; you can't feel completely safe anywhere IMO in those countries.
God you're dense. Who said I visited El Salvador? Even if I did, judge much? Are you on the way to jump off a cliff because of the arms we're gifting Israel?
We live in a different world now. New criminals will exploit their human rights to get away with crimes. See for example shoplifters who just take things off a shelf and walk out knowing no one will stop them because the law says you can’t go fuck them up.
The end result is a lot of good people’s lives are inconvenienced for the sake of protecting the rights of these bastards.
Flip the script, strip them of rights and throw them in a prison with no mercy, and the world suddenly becomes a more pleasant place for the good people, and nothing of value is lost. I won’t shed a tear for El Salvadoran criminals.
If you wholeheartedly trust the government, this is obviously the way to go.
The problem, especially in Latin America, is there's a long history of guys taking power, "doing whatever needs to be done to get the bad guys," and then...never giving up power. Usually killing lots of people who might get in their way. Often with full support of backers in the US government.
> end result is a lot of good people’s lives are inconvenienced for the sake of protecting the rights of these bastards
To be fair, criminals in El Salvador weren’t getting off on legal technicalities. They were never seeing a court due to police corruption. Bukele had to be extreme because he had to sidestep the police-justice system. That leaves federal police and the military, coarse tools.
> See for example shoplifters who just take things off a shelf and walk out knowing no one will stop them because the law says you can’t go fuck them up.
I never understood how some parts of US just allow that. I live in a country where we have very poor property protection laws, and police still gets routinely called for underage kids stealing chocolates, actually comes, and a whole procedure is done, including parents, a judge, etc.
Influenced by movies, I always assumed that a shopkeeper in US would just do the cowboy thing (I know i'm exaggerating a bit) and take out the gun and make the thief put the stuff back, or worse. Watching videos of whole gangs of people just coming inside a store, filling their baskets/carts and leaving while noone does anything seemed so surreal. In a rich country, you'd expect property to be protected, but it doesn't seem so. Even in some of the poorest countries in the world, something like this wouldn't happen, because even random people in the street would go out of their way to stop (and beat) a thief, and the police wouldn't be arresting a passerby for tripping an escaping thief or tackling them to the ground, but would focus on the thief.
I mean sure... allowing people to steal offsets the "social security" from the government to retailers, but the safety issue remains.
> I never understood how some parts of US just allow that.
Most jurisdictions have 'shopkeeper's privilege' and stopping a shoplifter is 100% OK. I think most large businesses don't expect or even allow hourly employees to assume the risk of stopping shoplifters because, to insurers, that math doesn't math. If an employee is required to chase and restrain a shoplifter, there's a good chance they'll get injured, become exposed to the money incinerator that is the US health care system, etc. Maybe the supposed shoplifter didn't actually steal anything, but the employee thought they did and injured them while restraining them. So you could have an injured employee and an innocent injured shopper. Now you're paying multiple six figures for health care claims over a $20 steak that wasn't stolen.
Not just that, the tradeoffs in developing countries are different on the ground. They have to do practical decision making based on limited resources and issues. The alternative is simply criminals taking over.
Do you have evidence that basic human rights and due process is unusually expensive and not feasible for developing countries ?
Because that doesn't seem to be the case given we've seen much of the world become developed over the last 50 years. And almost all have a functioning judicial system.
It is not only in developing countries, even in developed countries it is a bit of a problem, the rise of “far right” in Europe etc is an example to this.
"Do your own research" is a pretty thin rebuttal to "here's a source by a well regarded NGO".
And if you are saying Amnesty International is feeding propaganda through the mainstream media, that's also going to need some credible sources. They are generally considered a fairly highly factual organization.
* Latin America has a sad history of using what's been called "enforced disappearance" [0]. It's sickening that it seems to be happening again in El Salvador in 2024.
* There's no justification for ethnic or ideologic cleansings of any type, period. No, making tourists happy is not a good reason for state terrorism (nothing is).
* Bukele is untrustworthy. See "liquid ideology" on [1], just for a start.
I believe Bukele has claimed that the state is working to get trials for everyone, it's just taking a long time.
I totally believe that El Salvador lacks the necessary state capacity to try so many people rapidly.
My idea: To release innocent people faster, let friends/family members/etc. post a bond. Prisoners are tried in order from highest to lowest bond value. The bond is returned to the family if the prisoner is found innocent. If they're found guilty, the bond goes to the Salvadorean healthcare system or something like that.
Not saying they should have due process but there flip side is they will take 20 years to get through the queue while more pop up. Not sure how they have have it both ways.
For those who may want to spent an hour or so of their Sunday really learning about what has been happening in El Salvador, I recommend the wonderful Notes on El Salvador by Matt Lakeman [1]. The type of long form content that we all need more of; subjects like these have too many angles to learn from HN comments.
So, I read that when it popped up on HN a while ago. As someone who know approximately nothing about El Salvador I found it quite informative. Then I checked out an article on the sidebar about a country where I have lots of first hand knowledge, and found a fair bit of inaccuracies, and worse, omissions due to ideological slant. As always, lying by omission is powerful and you’re not even technically lying. Now, I’m not accusing the author of intentionally lying, but our opinions on things are all shaped by biased sources and the author themself is no different, and the point is to not so readily have your opinions shaped by some “wonderful” article online, especially when you know nothing about the topic otherwise.
Very good to know! May I ask what slant it was? From the article on El Salvador the conclusion felt like overall was that the Bukele's approach has probably been a net positive compared to predecessors, though he did point out plenty of negatives as well. Did this align with a particular slant you noticed on the other article?
Very true that it's necessary to keep in mind that even with texts that present themselves as well-researched, there could be plenty of angles omitted that may drastically change the conclusion. Still, I won't hesitate recommending it over random <200 character comments.
Well without going totally offtopic I’ll just say the other article has a typical “Western” slant, is replete with stereotypes and little things blown way out of proportions to fit the narrative, it’s clear the author has no first hand experience and is retelling a source (which is not even a somewhat neutral academic work but something released to fit a narrative), but they have no problem going into a confident meta-analysis of their own.
Since the typical “Western” view of El Salvador, AFAIK, is/was murderous shithole and not much else, I don’t know how that slant(?) could have tilted this piece.
"Basically every criminal in the country" without regard for charging them with any particular crime. Guilt by popular reputation, guilt by association, guilt by tattoo, guilt by suspicion or dislike. Indefinite sentence. No trial. Prison conditions as proudly abusive & humiliating as diplomatically feasible.
This is martial law, an internal military occupation with dictatorial control. An act of desperation welcomed only because El Salvador was previously, for decades, a bit of a failed state undergoing something tantamount to a low-grade civil war.
Martial law in the developing world doesn't have a history of going very well for very long. It's a brittle situation.
It’s hard to blame them for trying given what conditions were like there. But this is the sort of thing that’s very likely to end in tears. To do this kind of mass roundup requires a great deal of discretionary power and historically those granted such powers have very often abused them sooner or later.
Lol, houston is not even in the top 35 on that list. It's not even the biggest city in that list. Chicago has it beat. And my home town continues to represent as #1.
Just because it's a pet issue of mine: the FBI specifically warns against making a table like this one because crime stats from different agencies simply cannot be compared like that. It also tends to distort reality when a city with a relatively small Census resident population has a much larger daytime population due to commute patterns.
"A bad thing" is a highly variable judgement based on local rules, mores, and culture. And not every bad thing results in arrest. If I swear loudly, once, some people might think that's bad, but it's not going to get me arrested.
Buying one million when only ~20 million are in circulation is shocking, to put it mildly. It would be 5% of global supply just owned by the US government. Assuming prices didn't go up much after they started buying it would be 100 billion dollars worth
I’m aware, that bill is going to expire in 30 days so its irrelevant and will have to be reintroduced next year.
the President-Elect is interested too and campaigned on the same premise
what I’m talking about is far more expansive than 1 country’s national government instructing 1 agency to do it
In talking about several agencies across every sovereign and subdivision thereof. all municipalities doing the same. the sovereign credit market being leveraged to buy bitcoin continuously, just like we’re seeing the beginning of in the corporate credit market.
in case anyone wants to think about where this is really going and what that means for bitcoin’s scarcity
That’s… reductive. Government isnt either an amorphous entity when referring to a single one, and isnt an amorphous concept when referring to many
For the people that sell bitcoin, sovereign institutions will be amongst the exit liquidity
the sovereign's problem is that nobody, or less people, will want to be exit liquidity for their fiat
its fine that your patriotic indoctrination makes that an absurd concept to imagine about a government you respect, but there are also governments you dont respect and where this has already occurred, and that's going to continue occurring as they all compete for exit liquidity of their fiat
Fair enough. What the rest of their state financial asset investments are isn't clear: they've been doing smart debt recycling getting rid of high interest overhangs of being a basket case economy.
National exchequer isn't kitchen penny jar. I wouldn't personally invest in bitcoin because I don't like gambling and I'm content to live in an ETF world reflecting overall market trends, through my retirement fund. I wouldn't have a clue if they hold any and as long as it was a small % I wouldn't care much.
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