Tag Archives: Macri

My short piece for Dollars & Sense on Milei's economic program is out now, here. An early version is available here. Btw, this is the 50th anniversary issue. By coincidence, 20 years ago, a piece of mine on Brazil (and the Lula government back then) was also published on Dissent on their 50th anniversary issue.The Milei piece was written in June and revised around September. Now it seems more clear that they might receive some fresh money from the IMF, which will allow them to continue...

So I have no insider knowledge on what the Argentinean government plans to do. And the White House is a mess; they don't have any knowledge on what they plan to do. But Larry Kudlow, the Director of the National Economic Council, said that the Treasury is deeply involved in a plan to dollarize the Argentinean economy (Guillermo Calvo, an influential conservative economist, has also spoken in favor of dollarization; see here in Spanish). [embedded content] He supports a Currency Board to...

Brief note in Spanish (no translation, sorry) on the long history of central banks and the current policies of the Argentinean central bank (BCRA). The gist of the argument is that while central banks where created to finance developmental states in the nascent merchant capitalist societies, in the periphery they tended to follow the Victorian model (implemented later) emphasizing inflation control as the main official goal. However, often, as in the recent case of the BCRA, they are used...

Just a couple of years ago Argentina’s left of center government was besieged by foreign investors, the hedge funds known as Vulture Funds, that demanded full payment for their bonds acquired at heavily discounted prices in the secondary markets. The New York courts ruled in favor of the Vulture Funds, and Argentina was unable to borrow in international markets, even though during the successive governments of the late Néstor Kirchner and her wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner the country...

I'll post a longer discussion later, but I wanted to provide a short update on the situation in Argentina. Everything indicates, as I had noted before, that the government of Macri wanted to accelerate inflation, with depreciation and an increase in the electricity bill.Macri rehired the technician (Graciela Bevacqua) that had been fired by Cristina Kirchner, and that led to the (mostly true) critique that inflation was higher than the official measure indicated.  More importantly, for a...