The Age of Master Traders ......

Day 1,216, 07:54 • Published in India India • by Graf Sprat

Three days back I wrote an article in the MoF paper about how irrelevant the import tax has now become.

http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/the-death-of-import-tax-why-it-doesnt-matter-anymore-1713393/1/20

Irrespective of that, there were a spate of import tax modification proposals in the Indian congress. Some were voted in and some were not. As an MoF, I am not going to bother about getting them to a common base. Why? Because it really doesn't mean a thing anymore.

To understand how true that is, all one has to do is to open the Indian market screen and lookup the offers under higher Q categories. A host of offers are from people who dont even own the companies of that Q level.

Folks are simply using their orgs in countries where these goods are available at a cheaper price to buy and are donating it to their citizen account in their home country. And from there, they are listing it on the market at extremely competitive price. The import tax simply doesnt come into play. Isnt that nice ? The customer gets the cheapest price.

However this does impact the currency of the country as Sharry and other proponents of high import tax always reminded me while pressurizing the govt to increase import taxes . The reason had been that if foreign goods are sold in India, that leads to flight of gold from India to foreign countries and Indians dont have enough gold for boosters 😉

But looks like this change from admins have convinced them also that cheaper goods from abroad is a good idea since I see a lot of them listing Q5 products on the Indian market without having companies of that Q level. Well the lure of easy money is generally hard to resist. 😉

So it looks like we are moving from the age of Company Czars the age of Master Traders. The smaller countries like eIndia will now need to start looking towards alternate source of taxes such a VAT since on goods being sold like above, the country would neither make income tax (during their production) nor import tax during their import into the country

Which means that the trend of equalization has already started. Net Net, the admins have forcefully removed the import barriers from across the world. So slowly the absolute value of goods (in gold terms) across the world will gravitate towards a common value. And the value of a nation's currency will be driven mainly by its balance of trade.

Exciting times are certainly on the anvil..