First, such transactions tend to be focused on short-term gains rather than long-term productive investment. Second, speculative activity has harmful destabilizing effects on the real economy, contributing to volatility, financial crisis and, as a result, crises in the real economy in terms of lost output, unemployment, and economic insecurity that weighs most heavily on households with low incomes and few assets. Most rates are in the range of 0.1 per cent to 0.3 per cent but are as high as 0.6 per cent in Argentina (Burman etal. According to Rodrik (2006), the opportunity cost of those reserves is roughly i per cent of GDP.