15892: lyall on Haitian Banks (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: j.daudi <wastemaster@lyalls.net>

This talk of the haytian banks loaning 30 milyon to the BRH is interesting.

I bank at Sogebank. A few months ago they started advertising time
deposit rates of
6% on dollar accounts and 24% on gourde accounts. Wow! thought I.
Maybe I could scrape
some money together to get that 6% rate?

Well, the 6% rate requires a deposit of 250,000 u$d for 6 months. The
24% gourde rate is for
a deposit of 1 milyon gourdes for a year (i think). The gourde has
been rising slowly since the
lavaeconomists destoyed its value last summer. AFter cutting the
value in half (to 50 gourdes) it has come back to 40 and even a
little higher. I got 39.25 gou to the dola us last week.

Now, maybe some people are actually bringing dola us into the haytian
banking system so now
they have money to loan to the bank de repiblik de hayti. They
problem with this scenario is that the government can decide to
nationalize these foreign currency accounts at any time, as they were
secretly discussing last year during the crash. The example being
used at the time was the Koreans, who converted (so it is said, I
dunno) all the dola us accounts to Won.

Well, the problem with that comparison is that korea actually has an
economy. They produce things and they feed themselves on korean rice.

So, converting 25,000 u$d to gourde to get a 24% rate might be a good
idea if you live here and have that kind of money. And can spend that
many gourdes.
Anything expensive (like cars and houses) is priced in dola us.
Buying dola us back with that many gourdes is difficult too. In
February the banks refused to sell more than 20 u$d at a time.