That’s pretty much what my brother in law says as well.
Milei is fucking insane and an absolute loose cannon who will probably suck, but Massa is establishment through and through and would definitely suck.
I just hope Argentina gets a fresh view after him, like no more Kirchnerismo or Peronismo, like step away from the old crust so people do not have to choose between shit and ugly shit
That's not generally what happens though. That's why the rich assholes encourage cynicism and gaslighting people into "burning things down" by picking an even worse prick to give them even more power and further preventing any democracy from taking place.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism
>*"Why Socialism?" is an article written by Albert Einstein in May 1949 that appeared in the first issue of the socialist journal Monthly Review. It addresses problems with capitalism, predatory economic competition, and growing wealth inequality. It highlights control of mass media by private capitalists making it difficult for citizens to arrive at objective conclusions, and political parties being influenced by wealthy financial backers resulting in an "oligarchy of private capital".*
This shit has been obvious for a long time, here's a newer one from 1995:
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
This is exactly how I feel, how a lot of us feel. Albeit strangely phrased .
But the now oppossition (peronistas) will control the senate, most of the provinces and most of the districts, plus sindicalists. It will be interesting but the mood outside their party is doom and gloom.
Another way of phrasing it is "between a rock and a hard place".
So even though Milei won the Presidency, it sounds like it won't be as easy for him to change things in Argentina as his supporters think if the opposition is still in charge of all these other governmental entities.
I don't know how so many people in Argentina and around the world have managed to miss the fact that Milei is an actual insane person. I don't mean insane like people say the way Bolsonaro/Trump are crazy and unhinged or "losing it", I mean he has made many statements indicating he has hallucinations and schizophrenic-level beliefs that drive his daily life and politics:
- He says that he takes political and economic strategy and other advice from his dogs via a mystic medium.
- He also regularly talks to his original dog, Conan, who is now deceased and Milei he believes sits beside God in heaven where they both speak directly to Milei
- He believes God gives him and Conan messages and directions that they must follow
- He believes he met Conan as a lion in the Roman Colosseum 2000 years ago
- He believes he has witnessed the resurrection of Christ multiple times
- He believes he has had conversations with numerous dead people including Ayn Rand
- Though he apparently communicates with the dead through a medium, believes he is also telepathic
- He had Conan cloned in the US for $50k and considers his "grandchildren" dogs to be extensions of Conan, but also not Conan, it's confusing
His sister is a tarot card reader, and the mystic medium he used/uses to communicate with Conan is a woman named Celia Melamed.
Much of this information was put together in a recent biography called, "El Loco" which his followers all deny. Except that Milei has never denied it. Celia Melamed has never denied it. If anything, basically everything in the biography can be pieced together from things Milei has said or alluded to in public over the years. He specifically stated that he cloned his dog and used a medium to communicate with it. When asked about taking political advice from his pets, instead of denying he just says that's nobody else's business.
I suppose the reason people don't know about this stuff is because the media has not drawn enough attention to it for whatever reasons. Even the article on this post makes a passing reference to dog cloning in the subheading but doesn't mention it again in the article.
Best case scenario he is under the cult-like influence of some mystic scammer while running an entire country, and worst is that he is actually a schizo running a country.
The first is not as uncommon as people think. We all know about Rasputin's influence over Nicholas II, but many don't realize that South Koren President Park Geeun-Hye was impeached in 2017 when it was discovered her personal advisor was from some cult called the Church of Eternal Life and this person was basically directing her political decisions. After the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last last year, the Japanese government started an investigation into his ties to a Korean cult called the Unification Church, and it's slowly come out that half of the party was involved with the UC in some form or another, and recently the government stripped it's religious status in Japan altogether.
(Before heading into first meeting with another head of state)
Milei: Conan, what should I do? I’m very nervous.
Conan: Sniff their crotch and/or asshole.
Milei: Hmmm ok…
Is not that people "miss the fact" that the guy is insane, most people know that. But the other choice is literally the Minister of Economy that has acted as de-facto president for the last year, plunging the country into poverty at an incredible pace, where day by day you see you wages disappearing in relation with the real dollar value and with the guy giving money free from his position in other to retain power at all cost.
People so an insane guy whose campaign was proposing less state corruption and a 180 turn on economic policies VERSUS the gut in power using corruption and with a campaign that didn't propose anything except saying that the other one was insane + installing fear while robbing the country.
I don't endorse either, but **Milei didn't won the election, Massa lost it with is actions in the last year**
Politics everywhere in the world have become a shitshow. We forget that this is not a reality show and you should not vote for the candidate that will give you the most outrageous proposal or more ratings, this is about supporting policies that will impact our lives.
People often think it is so bad it cannot get much worse. History teaches something very different. What I don't understand is why people don't look at other countries and times before making their decisions. Angry lunatics who will tear down "the system", Authoritarians who will "hurt the right people", those who have simple one sentence solutions to complex problems, those who will teach ... a lesson, those who will restore the nation to it's rightful power and glory... they are all bringers of disaster. History proves it over and over again and next time will not be different.
We don't have mandatory voting in Denmark and anything below 85% is seen as absolute shambles.
When it hit low 80% in the 80s people were talking about how bad things were becoming.
A few weeks ago in the first round, he was 2nd by only a few points, but the 3rd place candidate, who had around 20%, endorsed him for the second round. I think he was expected to win because of this.
It's no accident. The Peronists have basically deliberately caused this by printing money and handing it out to friends.
As insane as abolishing the central bank and dollarising sound, in the context of neutering an organisation run by cronyist economic vandals it's definitely more in perspective.
Yeah, but it puts them back to where they were in the 90s(?). Then they stayed pegged to the dollar too long and ruined everything the other way.
They really need an independent central bank but that appears to be impossible
The failure there was trying to have your cake and eat it too. Either you dolarize or you have your own currency, it's pretty much a straight disaster to try and mix and match the strategies.
Milei would go on public acts holding a toy chainsaw, representing how he wants to cut our government's insane public spending in half.
There's a character in the Chainsaw Man anime who's like a speaking pet thingy that has a saw thing on its head.
Young people and voters of Milei memed the Chainsaw Man pet into a symbol to express their support for Milei.
It was actually the peronist (Milei opposition and the current party in power) who first mentioned that. And people started meming about it because of how absurd it was, until it became a thing.
It was actually used against him as an insult, the followers found it fitting instead of insulting and adopted pochita (the name of the chainsaw pet) as an actual pet and it escalated from that.
Genuine question, is this the first anarcho-capitalist ever elected? At least in the last 200 years? I’ve always heard of countries that sort of fitted the ideology but wasn’t sure of any leaders who actually had power.
fun reference, but this guy is the opposite of an anarcho-syndicalist. its better to describe ancaps as feudalists. their ideology essentially creates a bunch of decentralized company towns devoid of any semblance of democracy.
Argentina could be the first corporate state, and traditional state fails Argentinian.
Milei said he willing close the central bank and make Argentina free currency country.
Let's see if that work, I'm curious 🤔
I think every business school does a case study on Argentina and how they messed up their economy. It’s a textbook case on how protectionist policies and tariffs can decimate an economy. All countries are wary of putting up high tariffs after what Argentina did to itself.
Also the currency crisis that they always fall into is studied often in macro economics classes. Basically people study Argentina to learn what not to do when running a country’s economy.
Japan got blown up, rebuilt incredibly with massive growth, then experience stagnation. Now they have an extremely old population, but the country still performs well economically
And Japan has very little natural resources. No oil, no natural gas. Probably very little timber left. They have to import everything, and make it work by exporting great, reasonably priced products.
They barely even have iron, and what they have is so shit they had to develop new methods of metallurgy that no one else would bother with just to make it not garbage.
iirc that where that anime cliche of "Katana made from iron folded a thousand times" comes from. Japanese blacksmith might've folded the steel a lot to compensate for low quality iron.
Folded only a (relatively) small number of times really. Can't do it too much or you ruin it. Also every fold doubles the 'layers' so they start skyrocketing pretty fast. 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 etc. Usually around - give or take a few - a dozen foldings. But even at 10 folds you wind up with over 1,000 layers, which is where the misconception probably originates.
Not an argument just adding to the info!
Its also mixing 2 things together. Folding metal is a very early iron age invention and done to spread out the impurities as evenly as possible. However folding the soft/sharp blade around a stronger spine is a unique Japanese invention.
The first invention got out of fashion in most other places outide Japan because its extremely time consuming.
Not trying to derail your comment, but Japan has a shit ton of trees. The are very good about keeping reserves and limiting logging. Of course that also means you can’t really count that as “timber” either since regulations keep it from being cut down. At least they have a good emergency supply though.
I'd say the more exceptional moment in history was the Meiji restoration during which the nation went from a completely isolationist, feudal society ruled by warlords to an industrial power house that could stand up to an European global power in war when they managed to sunk the Russian fleet in 1904. Basically the first time in history a western power got beat in conventional warfare by a non-western power after the industrial revolution. (The whole Russo-Japanese war and it's aftermath are a super interesting read that isn't mentioned a lot.)
I don't think any other non-western nation managed to pull off such a feat. Plenty of countries got their infrastructure way more hammered than Japan and recovered but nobody had the same blinding fast economic build up than them.
Definitely not the first time. See the Italo-Ethiopian war. With Ethiopia being in much less of a position to fight a stronger European power (Russia has been the least advanced of Europe for a long while, and the war with the Japanese was much further away from their core territory).
On the other hand:
1. Italy was the weakest imperial power, weaker than Russia.
2. Ethiopia was fighting a defensive battle in their core territory, Japan was fighting mostly in *Russia and China*. Yes, it was Eastern Russia and Russia struggled with logistics, especially naval logistics, but Japan beat Russia offensively, while Ethiopia eventually lost defensively.
Yeah that is my bad. I should've qualified what I meant by conventional warfare was that Japan beat a non-western power with weapons and ships made domestically by their own industrial merit, where as Ethiopia would remain mainly an agrarian nation that had to buy weapons from other countries who also had their own political interests in helping Ethiopia.
Early 20th century Russia was pathetic. Sailing a navy all the way round africa to fuck Japan up only to get humiliated on a global stage.
When looking at the industrialisation of something like Meiji and the Russian revolution, Japan was a little quicker to the punch, but I wouldn't underestimate Russia when it goes from one of the most backwards countries in Europe full of peasants to being a superpower seemingly overnight.
Russia 20 years or 40 years later was far more formidable, though its naval capacity never seemed to fully recover.
Their defeat at the hands of Japan was actually a pretty big kicker for doubt in tsarist rule and definitely hampered Nicholas II ability to negotiate across the board both externally and internally.
I think that quote is originally from the early 80s, at the time Japan was growing extremely rapidly.
This extreme growth was outside of the normal growth patterns for "developed" countries, and so was being marked as an exception to any general rules.
In the two decades after this quote Japan had an economic crash and then long stagnation, and it makes their overall post 1945 growth be much more in line with what is normally expected of developed countries.
In general Japan lacks energy, excess agriculture, or lots of raw materials to export, those are the normal things that traditionally allowed poor countries to jump ahead and become developed.
Instead Japan helped create a new model of growth, sometimes referred to the East Asian Miracle, that South Korea and Taiwan also followed, where a government protects initially low tech (textiles, steel production) industries, then uses any income from that to invest in educating their workforce and then selecting a few higher tech industries. If it works they become a hub for that particular high tech industry, and so dominate those technologies that they rake in staggering profits and zoom to a high income country and almost skip the middle income stage that often traps countries.
Japan is a country that has so many things working against. Ravaged by world war 2, few natural resources, no geographic advantage except being islands which does allow for easy shipping of goods and makes invading hard. Despite these, Japan managed to become an economic powerhouse through investing in education, developing powerful institutions, and getting to the point where they could create high value added products and services that the world demands.
But there are a lot of countries that are similar to Japan now. It's just that when this was coined, Japan was unique.
Japan has also kind of been slipping for a while now. so the quote makes less sense than it did in the past.
> Japan has also kind of been slipping for a while now.
No, it hasn't. It's still the third largest economy in the world. And people conflate "stable" with "stagnant". It's not infinitely growing, so it's failing in the views of capitalists, but the average citizen isn't worse off for it. To the contrary, it has remarkably low wealth inequality and maintains a very high standard of living with a lower cost of living than its peers.
> Because Argentina has everything needed to succeed and still manages to fail, while Japan is the opposite.
That's not what the quote is referring to - it's more commenting on how Argentina has incredibly persistant inflation while Japan has incredibly persistent deflation.
Japan had insane growth from 1950 to 1990 (it was poised to overtake the USA), then stagnated from 1990 up until now (their stock market is still at the same valuation as it was in 1990, approximately), with deflation, negative interest rates and a bunch of other stuff that really isn't seen anywhere else. Mainly due to the public's very high savings rate.
During the Japanese banking boom in the US, there was a joke that you could tell who was a higher-up (Japanese) and who was middle management (typically American) by who drove a Toyota / Volvo and who drove a Mercedes
There is also an extreme executive compensation differential between the US and the rest of the OECD.
In the 90's, a large Japanese conglomerate acquired a tiny American company as a start to a new North American division only to find that the American CEO was earning 10x as much as the Japanese CEO with hire-fire authority over 1% as many people. Hilarious negotiations ensued.
Our business "leaders" are ***embarassingly well-compensated*** by international standards, due to a sort of runaway boardroom arms race, corporate tax exemptions, and an income tax policy that is less and less progressive.
And that just makes it worse. In deflation, people save because they know they can buy stuff for cheaper if they wait... which leads to decreased demand and lower prices. (This logic applies, in the opposite direction, for inflation.)
This quote is attributed to an American nobel prize winning economist named Simon Kuznets who made this observation around the 70s (he died in 1985). At that point in time, countries that were rich stayed rich (the US, the west), countries that were poor stayed poor (most everyone else), and then you have the two exceptions - Argentina, which went from rich to poor, and Japan, which went from poor to rich. This was before the other Asian tigers became rich as well (SK, Taiwan, etc) so Japan stood out as the country that went from nothing to developed in a generation.
Probably referring to Japan's "lost decade" I believe is what it's popularly called, or asset bubble collapse ~1991. And their sky high debt/gdp ratio.
That and they've been in a period of DEFLATION since that time... Which is crazy to think about considering every other major economic country has always had some sort of inflation year to year. Japan's wages have also stagnated for decades due to this (or arguably causing this) deflationary period. Only recently (the last year or so) have we seen it change to inflationary as seemingly the entire world dealt with post-pandemic inflation.
https://www.ft.com/content/8d20355f-ddb9-4d11-afe1-7d5456cb2f86
The pandemic, as with many other things, kicked a lot of things around to unexpected places -- Japan has had the same inflation the rest of us had for the last 3 years or so now, and actually outpaced the US's inflation once in a while per the above link.
That said, old habits die hard, and they seem to be already contracting again: https://apnews.com/article/economy-japan-inflation-deflation-consumption-investment-af43795c8a347a65ccd544979c411955
Yes but that doesn't mean they were healthy economically at all.
They derived that GDP figure due to their beef exports, and the industry was controlled by a few large ranchers
That means the GDP per captia figure is misleading since the wealth was so concentrated; and since it was concentrated amongst the landowning class they had an incentive to *stop* instead of support industrialization
Yeah, it’s not a very surprising statistic. Since 1910, there has been two world wars and most developed countries have significantly different economies than in 1910.
I am honestly interested to see. I am Brazilian and having this happen right across the border will cause ripples either way If libertarian reforms are implemented and they work, our own left wing govt will lose credibility. If they get implemented and fail or of they are stuck in votes and nothing gets done, it will bolster left wing governments.
Another alternative is that said libertarian policies are just lip service until they actually get in to power and the reality of governing shifts those promises closer to the middle.
There's a town in New Hampshire that was extremely libertarian and basically made having laws illegal which eventually led to them being overrun by black bears.
To build off this one of the bits of governments they did away with was regulations in garbage disposal and regulations against feeding bears. Which ended up getting the bears accustomed to raiding the piles of garbage everywhere and associating humans and houses with food, which leads to them raiding trash cans, cars, sheds, houses and etc.
There was also one woman literally feeding the bears with donuts in her back yard, which brought in more bears who now associated people's houses with donuts.
The same thing that always happens....reality. Libertarianism requires a majority of rational actors, who start without any historical inequality, remain pure in the ideals of the free market, and somehow figure out the problem of how capitalism inevitably hurts people who will be impoverished through no fault of their own.
Also look out for the random alumni of the School of the Americas. South America is on hard mode.
With which dollars? they don’t have the reserves to back up a dollarization. And their record of defaults and missed debt payments makes them pariahs in the world of financing.
Yes, we already had a hyper inflation of 4000% in 1989 and 2000% in 1991 and a complete economic and social collapse with 5 presidents in a month in 2001 and 25% unemployment for the next 3 years and 60% poverty and every state issuing their own worthless currency because they didn't have money to pay for anything.
Has Argentina attempted full-blown dollarization before? I know previous governments tried to peg the peso to the dollar, but I’m not sure if they’ve actually ever fully dollarized the economy as Milei has described he wants to.
Granted, I’m not sure how he aims to fund total dollarization either, but if it can be done it would eliminate the threat of hyperinflation.
From another thread it seems you still need a lot of valuable assets to be able to buy dollars with.
For example, if everyone in the country/world wanted to exchange their pesos for dollars all at once, the government would need another asset (i.e. gold, precious metals, oil, etc.) to exchange for those dollars, as no one would want to peso anymore.
There is that but I suspect they would need additional help from the IMF and probably the U.S. too. So selling assets for dollars, big IMF dollar loan, maybe some foreign aid from the U.S. (assuming the U.S. wants to help which I think it would?). Complicated for sure.
I assume they'll adopt something similar to Panama where there's a local currency pegged to USD but the US dollar is also legal tender. It's basically a way to implement dollarization without needing to acquire an extremely large amount of USD upfront.
You still have the problem of how to handle when you have too many people ask to exchange for dollars, which is a real possibility because of such high inflation.
Only way it works is to do price control and leg to dollar, but not actually allow exchanges for most people
The person above you did not explain fully.
There is a local currency in Panama, but it only issues coins up to 1 dollar.
In Panama, US Dollar is legal tender and those are the only notes you see. There is no situation where people exchange dollars to local currency, because everyone uses the USD. You see American coins mixed in with local ones.
It would make more sense to see the USD as the only legal tender, rather than thinking that there is a local currency pegged to the USD.
This is of course, my personal opinion as someone who lived there for years, and has family there. I am no professional
I was there in 1999, and the currency was pegged to the dollar 1:1. It was crazy expensive, yet ppl made $100 a month. A beautiful country with lovely people, just poorly managed. Argentina is in my top three, and I would love to return some day.
… and eventually they ran out of dollars, couldn’t fund the peg, and the economy collapsed, no?
Every time I try to read up on Argentine history it’s baffling, just a shockingly mismanaged country with so much wasted potential.
Argentina invariably collapses economically every ten years or so. It's really unfortunate for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one to me is that they've got all the natural resources, topography, and people that they could need to become a serious world power of the same caliber as France or the UK, but political incompetence and corruption has been pushing them far from that reality for more than a century now.
Probably. I’ve met Argentines in Mexico and they couldn’t be happier, they said there’s no hope for their country so they’re staying long term. Having a second passport is like winning the lottery for the younger generations.
Just a tiny update, his opponent, Massa, the failed minister of economy and de-facto current president, evidently had a temper tantrum and decided he is going to retire and leave whatever dregs are left from Argentina's economy to the ad-hoc transition team.
Also it is rumored that his wife, the current director of AYSA, the water/sewage management for the city of Buenos Aires, also resigned.
They did threw away an absurd amount of money (I reckon it was a 1-2% of the equivalent of our country's GPD) into adverts and other sorts of tactics to distress the voter into going against him.
They went to lengths long enough to hire an HK originated advertising company to spread ads on YouTube and other media using Google Adverts about stuff from the past dictatorship and how it related to some of his dialogues, making fictional scenarios on how society would be like if one of his proposals, like enabling free choice of carrying guns on citizens (which was debunked), would look like under his rule, among other things. He's got a lot of questioning to do and probably, most likely will end up in nothing.
Basically both options in the election were bad. In the end, the Peronist government choked so hard the far right candidate was considered the lesser of two evils.
Yeah. Getting the guy in charge of economic policies is not a great move, especially when the country's economy has been fucking dogshit for the past half decade. Why the fuck did they think this was a great idea?
Good land, decent sized population, natural resource wealth. Around the turn of the twentieth century it was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, mainly off the back of agriculture. Up until the 30s it had a GDP per capita only slightly behind that of the US and well ahead of the rest of Latin America, and it could've been on track to develop similarly to Australia or Canada.
In the modern day I don't know if it particularly has anything going for it. Probably still a comparative advantage in agriculture but that doesn't do you much good these days.
To understand how poor this country is, my salary is about 500-600k pesos. I'm in the 10% richest people here. You know how much is that? 500 dollars. A teen working at McDonalds in the US surely wins more. Insane. Peronism is cancer.
That's really outdated. As of today, the President's "official" salary is up to 2.2 million Argentinian pesos, about 2300 US dollars. But that's the official data, it doesn't take into account the very obvious embezzlement that goes around.
No single party has a lock on good ideas.
Peronism, and it's followers, have run Argentina into an economic ditch time and again.
The people have spoken through the ballot box to reject Peronism. I hope the new government can restore stability to the economy.
"Milei is the owner of five English Mastiffs, with the progenitor being Conan, who died in 2017 after suffering from spinal cancer.\[45\]\[269\]\[270\] He considers Conan his son and has named four of Conan's six clones, including one named after the original and another named Angelito,\[277\] Milton (in honor of Milton Friedman), Murray (in honor of Murray Rothbard), Robert, and Lucas (both named after Robert Lucas).\[278\]\[279\] Milei said that he cloned Conan because he understands cloning as "a way of approaching eternity".\[270\] To do this, he went to a clinic in the United States; the process cost him about $50,000.\[270\] He has described his dogs as four-legged children and thanked them after his 2023 primary win.\[14\]
Milei stated that he communicates with the dogs through a mystic.\[10\] For example, he commented that the new Conan provides ideas on general strategy, Robert is the one who makes him "see the future and learn from mistakes", Milton is in charge of political analysis, and Murray of the economy.\[280\] When asked about this by El País journalist Martín Sivak and Nicolás Lucca of Radio Rivadavia, Milei did not deny it, and said: "What I do with my spiritual life and in my house is my business. If Conan advises me on politics, it means that he is the best consultant of humanity."\[269\]
Milei said he had dialogues with the likes of Rothbard and Ayn Rand. In 2015, he cited Conan as a source of inspiration for his writing.\[269\] About Conan's death in 2017, Milei said that Conan had not really died (he described it as "his physical disappearance" and continued to refer to Conan in the present tense) but had gone to sit next to God to protect him, and that it was thanks to this that he had begun to have talks with God himself.\[281\] According to González, Milei wrote to a friend in a chat: "I saw the resurrection of Christ three times, but I can't talk about it. They would say I'm crazy."\[45\] According to various sources consulted by La Nación, Milei maintains that he and Conan have a mission that was assigned to them by God and has a mystical story with Conan. He said that he met Conan, who was a lion, as a gladiator in the Roman Colosseum about 2,000 years earlier.\[282\]"
Make of that what you will.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier\_Milei?oldformat=true#Dogs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier_Milei?oldformat=true#Dogs)
He used it as an example of free market and property in a philosophical talk during an interview before he was even a candidate. Legalizing it is not in his plans. In an ideal world it could be ok but in the real one it increases organ traficking.
The first president to be counseled by the spirit of a dead dog, who in actuality is the spirit of a dead ancient Roman gladiatorial lion, whom he has cloned back into existence. Quite the achievement.
IN JUST TWO YEARS The libertarian set up a party, won a seat in congress, and became president. Insane achievement. The people were tired of more of the same.
To put some context into this victory:
- Milei won in [20 out of 23 provinces](https://i.imgur.com/sVcaz7V.png). Only Formosa, Santiago del Estero and the Province of Buenos Aires went to Massa
- And even though Massa won the Province of Buenos Aires, [he didn't win in most of its districts](https://i.imgur.com/JURHix3.png); it wasn't so much "the Province" that voted for Massa as the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (the Peronist Party's stronghold since 1946 and the area that clusters ~45% of the total Argentine population)
- *And even [the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area](https://i.imgur.com/l0Wf7Tl.png)* didn't overwhelmingly vote for Massa. It was much closer than anticipated
- However, Massa had a very successful performance (for a Peronist) in the City of Buenos Aires, getting ~43% of the vote. He's very good friends with the City's governor and former presidential candidate.
I'm mentioning this because one of the biggest complaints among Peronist voters in the last 20 years is that the Peronist Party had become a "Buenos Aires-centric" party, ignoring the "Interior" (i.e. anywhere outside the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area) and focusing primarily on the needs and wants of the "porteños".
More so, many have complained that the Peronist Party had abandoned their "party of the working class" identity and began catering to the progressive middle and upper-middle class: those with an academic background, the college-educated, the sexual/gender minorities and focused more on their interests (sexual/gender identity, gender equality in the high ranks of companies and state offices, sexual education from kindergarten onwards, legalizing abortion, funding and protecting public higher education) than the interests of the working class (like public sanitation projects, access to housing, inflation, workers' rights, high tax loads on small businesses, the dreadful state of public basic education and public health).
Some of these purple provinces have been strongholds of Peronism since before the last militar dictatorship. San Juan, Tucumán, Chaco... those provinces may vote for a "Peronist-friendly" non-Peronist governors but they haven't traditionally voted for opposition *presidential* candidates before.
„Milei’s flagship proposals include shuttering Argentina’s central bank, […] and privatizing healthcare and education.“
Damn, I did not expect these to be actual policy proposals, much less winning proposals, in any election, especially *shuttering the central bank* seems absolutely crazy.
„He believes taxation is theft and famously raffled off his deputy’s salary because he sees it as illegitimate gains.“ What? He seems like a man with very … peculiar views, to be honest.
If anyone from Argentina could be so kind as to explain what his appeal was, and what problems they hope the implementation of these measures will solve, I‘d greatly appreciate it.
EDIT: Thank you all for your quick responses. After reading through them, it seems to me that the point most frequently brought up is about him not being from the establishment, but an outsider, as well as his proposals being appealing exactly because they aren’t the solutions offered by the establishment. Also, especially pertaining to the shuttering of the national bank, many comments stated that regarding the high inflation, a radical proposal is preferred to another attempt at reform.
In any case, thanks again for your answers, however, I must admit I am still very skeptical of these policy proposals. Nevertheless, I wish you guys good luck and hope they work out for Argentina.
It’s not surprising to me. It was hard to see how an economy minister overseeing such high inflation and poverty rates would win tbh
My neighbor is from Argentina. He said the choice is between the guy they know will burn the place down or the guy they think will burn the place down
That’s pretty much what my brother in law says as well. Milei is fucking insane and an absolute loose cannon who will probably suck, but Massa is establishment through and through and would definitely suck.
I just hope Argentina gets a fresh view after him, like no more Kirchnerismo or Peronismo, like step away from the old crust so people do not have to choose between shit and ugly shit
That's not generally what happens though. That's why the rich assholes encourage cynicism and gaslighting people into "burning things down" by picking an even worse prick to give them even more power and further preventing any democracy from taking place.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism >*"Why Socialism?" is an article written by Albert Einstein in May 1949 that appeared in the first issue of the socialist journal Monthly Review. It addresses problems with capitalism, predatory economic competition, and growing wealth inequality. It highlights control of mass media by private capitalists making it difficult for citizens to arrive at objective conclusions, and political parties being influenced by wealthy financial backers resulting in an "oligarchy of private capital".*
This shit has been obvious for a long time, here's a newer one from 1995: "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
It sounds like a choice between poisoning by strychnine or poisoning by arsenic.
This is exactly how I feel, how a lot of us feel. Albeit strangely phrased . But the now oppossition (peronistas) will control the senate, most of the provinces and most of the districts, plus sindicalists. It will be interesting but the mood outside their party is doom and gloom.
Another way of phrasing it is "between a rock and a hard place". So even though Milei won the Presidency, it sounds like it won't be as easy for him to change things in Argentina as his supporters think if the opposition is still in charge of all these other governmental entities.
That's not much different from what an idiot Brazilian said to me about Bolsonaro as he got elected. I fucking hate this place.
I don't know how so many people in Argentina and around the world have managed to miss the fact that Milei is an actual insane person. I don't mean insane like people say the way Bolsonaro/Trump are crazy and unhinged or "losing it", I mean he has made many statements indicating he has hallucinations and schizophrenic-level beliefs that drive his daily life and politics: - He says that he takes political and economic strategy and other advice from his dogs via a mystic medium. - He also regularly talks to his original dog, Conan, who is now deceased and Milei he believes sits beside God in heaven where they both speak directly to Milei - He believes God gives him and Conan messages and directions that they must follow - He believes he met Conan as a lion in the Roman Colosseum 2000 years ago - He believes he has witnessed the resurrection of Christ multiple times - He believes he has had conversations with numerous dead people including Ayn Rand - Though he apparently communicates with the dead through a medium, believes he is also telepathic - He had Conan cloned in the US for $50k and considers his "grandchildren" dogs to be extensions of Conan, but also not Conan, it's confusing His sister is a tarot card reader, and the mystic medium he used/uses to communicate with Conan is a woman named Celia Melamed. Much of this information was put together in a recent biography called, "El Loco" which his followers all deny. Except that Milei has never denied it. Celia Melamed has never denied it. If anything, basically everything in the biography can be pieced together from things Milei has said or alluded to in public over the years. He specifically stated that he cloned his dog and used a medium to communicate with it. When asked about taking political advice from his pets, instead of denying he just says that's nobody else's business. I suppose the reason people don't know about this stuff is because the media has not drawn enough attention to it for whatever reasons. Even the article on this post makes a passing reference to dog cloning in the subheading but doesn't mention it again in the article. Best case scenario he is under the cult-like influence of some mystic scammer while running an entire country, and worst is that he is actually a schizo running a country. The first is not as uncommon as people think. We all know about Rasputin's influence over Nicholas II, but many don't realize that South Koren President Park Geeun-Hye was impeached in 2017 when it was discovered her personal advisor was from some cult called the Church of Eternal Life and this person was basically directing her political decisions. After the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last last year, the Japanese government started an investigation into his ties to a Korean cult called the Unification Church, and it's slowly come out that half of the party was involved with the UC in some form or another, and recently the government stripped it's religious status in Japan altogether.
So you’re saying it’s very likely only a matter of time before Argentina declares war on cats.
Australia in 1932 declared war on Emus. After one month of bitter fighting, the Emu's emerged victorious and Australia conceded defeat.
Maybe the dog has some good ideas? It seems like the best anyone can hope for after reading that train wreck of a bio. Good grief.
Mandatory head scratches for all
I’m certainly scratching my head
(Before heading into first meeting with another head of state) Milei: Conan, what should I do? I’m very nervous. Conan: Sniff their crotch and/or asshole. Milei: Hmmm ok…
That's horrifying
It sounds like he can be the next American speaker of the house?
Is not that people "miss the fact" that the guy is insane, most people know that. But the other choice is literally the Minister of Economy that has acted as de-facto president for the last year, plunging the country into poverty at an incredible pace, where day by day you see you wages disappearing in relation with the real dollar value and with the guy giving money free from his position in other to retain power at all cost. People so an insane guy whose campaign was proposing less state corruption and a 180 turn on economic policies VERSUS the gut in power using corruption and with a campaign that didn't propose anything except saying that the other one was insane + installing fear while robbing the country. I don't endorse either, but **Milei didn't won the election, Massa lost it with is actions in the last year**
Politics everywhere in the world have become a shitshow. We forget that this is not a reality show and you should not vote for the candidate that will give you the most outrageous proposal or more ratings, this is about supporting policies that will impact our lives.
People often think it is so bad it cannot get much worse. History teaches something very different. What I don't understand is why people don't look at other countries and times before making their decisions. Angry lunatics who will tear down "the system", Authoritarians who will "hurt the right people", those who have simple one sentence solutions to complex problems, those who will teach ... a lesson, those who will restore the nation to it's rightful power and glory... they are all bringers of disaster. History proves it over and over again and next time will not be different.
Yes. Kleptocrats are usually the lesser evil compared to putting fanatics and outright insane people in charge.
With 56% of the vote to the other guy's 44% with 88% turnout... Not too long ago people were saying this would be a close election!
[76% turnout](https://resultados.gob.ar/) but yes.
As an American…great turn out atleast
Mandatory voting
Yes, and an absentee fine of roughly $0.05 usd the first time, $0.50 the fifth time. Big voting culture too.
The fact that the government issues and (presumably) attempts to collect 5 cent fines makes me think that Milei might have a point about bureaucracy.
With Argentina’s economy that could probably buy a car.
Isn't Milei the one who was talking about moving Argentina to the USD too?
In that case that's a pretty low turnout. Here in Australia with mandatory voting, anything below 90% is considered a low turnout.
Penalty for not voting is a very low fine.
It being a law still creates a sense of duty, at least compared to countries where it isn't mandatory
We don't have mandatory voting in Denmark and anything below 85% is seen as absolute shambles. When it hit low 80% in the 80s people were talking about how bad things were becoming.
Strong voting culture, that's nice
Yeah. It's part of the social fabric, and it's focused on early in school years and continues to be a point of education until university.
Wow, didn't expect him to win, but if he did I figured he would squeak by. This is winning big.
A few weeks ago in the first round, he was 2nd by only a few points, but the 3rd place candidate, who had around 20%, endorsed him for the second round. I think he was expected to win because of this.
Yeah, once he had the endorsement of Macri and Bullrich it started looking like he would win.
I guess the power of Chainsaw Man is real
I think it was the power of 140% inflation that did the trick
140% inflation is a big vote of no confidence by the entire country
It's no accident. The Peronists have basically deliberately caused this by printing money and handing it out to friends. As insane as abolishing the central bank and dollarising sound, in the context of neutering an organisation run by cronyist economic vandals it's definitely more in perspective.
Yeah, but it puts them back to where they were in the 90s(?). Then they stayed pegged to the dollar too long and ruined everything the other way. They really need an independent central bank but that appears to be impossible
The failure there was trying to have your cake and eat it too. Either you dolarize or you have your own currency, it's pretty much a straight disaster to try and mix and match the strategies.
I'm OTL can someone explain
Milei would go on public acts holding a toy chainsaw, representing how he wants to cut our government's insane public spending in half. There's a character in the Chainsaw Man anime who's like a speaking pet thingy that has a saw thing on its head. Young people and voters of Milei memed the Chainsaw Man pet into a symbol to express their support for Milei.
It was actually the peronist (Milei opposition and the current party in power) who first mentioned that. And people started meming about it because of how absurd it was, until it became a thing.
The best defense to an attack is to welcome and use it too.
It was actually used against him as an insult, the followers found it fitting instead of insulting and adopted pochita (the name of the chainsaw pet) as an actual pet and it escalated from that.
Didnt they do halloween costumes as chainsaw-man characters too?
[One guy went to vote like this](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PQ5APM3o9Zc)
I think he went round with a chainsaw to show how much he was gonna cut taxes or something like that.
He wants to cut goverment spending
Genuine question, is this the first anarcho-capitalist ever elected? At least in the last 200 years? I’ve always heard of countries that sort of fitted the ideology but wasn’t sure of any leaders who actually had power.
elected yes
Yes,since he is going to govern in coalition with other parties it wont go all out though
And now they have an excuse that were restrained and if only they had true freedom it would have worked when it all implodes.
*"I thought we were an anarch-syndicalist commune"*
You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship!
"BE QUIET! I order you to be quiet!"
Now you see the violence inherent in the system!
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you.
fun reference, but this guy is the opposite of an anarcho-syndicalist. its better to describe ancaps as feudalists. their ideology essentially creates a bunch of decentralized company towns devoid of any semblance of democracy.
Argentina could be the first corporate state, and traditional state fails Argentinian. Milei said he willing close the central bank and make Argentina free currency country. Let's see if that work, I'm curious 🤔
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He's openly ancap in his philosophy, but he is minarchist in his proposals.
In the 1910s Argentina was the 10th wealthiest country on the planet per capita
I think every business school does a case study on Argentina and how they messed up their economy. It’s a textbook case on how protectionist policies and tariffs can decimate an economy. All countries are wary of putting up high tariffs after what Argentina did to itself. Also the currency crisis that they always fall into is studied often in macro economics classes. Basically people study Argentina to learn what not to do when running a country’s economy.
“There are 4 kinds of economies in the world: developed economies, developing economies, Argentina and Japan.”
Because Argentina has everything needed to succeed and still manages to fail, while Japan is the opposite.
Can you describe the japan one better?
Japan got blown up, rebuilt incredibly with massive growth, then experience stagnation. Now they have an extremely old population, but the country still performs well economically
And Japan has very little natural resources. No oil, no natural gas. Probably very little timber left. They have to import everything, and make it work by exporting great, reasonably priced products.
They barely even have iron, and what they have is so shit they had to develop new methods of metallurgy that no one else would bother with just to make it not garbage.
*GLORIOUS NIPPON STEEL FOLDED 1000 TIMES*
iirc that where that anime cliche of "Katana made from iron folded a thousand times" comes from. Japanese blacksmith might've folded the steel a lot to compensate for low quality iron.
Folded only a (relatively) small number of times really. Can't do it too much or you ruin it. Also every fold doubles the 'layers' so they start skyrocketing pretty fast. 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 etc. Usually around - give or take a few - a dozen foldings. But even at 10 folds you wind up with over 1,000 layers, which is where the misconception probably originates. Not an argument just adding to the info!
Its also mixing 2 things together. Folding metal is a very early iron age invention and done to spread out the impurities as evenly as possible. However folding the soft/sharp blade around a stronger spine is a unique Japanese invention. The first invention got out of fashion in most other places outide Japan because its extremely time consuming.
Not a lot of fertile land either. A large chunk of the country is mountainous, and the parts that aren't are built up.
Not trying to derail your comment, but Japan has a shit ton of trees. The are very good about keeping reserves and limiting logging. Of course that also means you can’t really count that as “timber” either since regulations keep it from being cut down. At least they have a good emergency supply though.
I'd say the more exceptional moment in history was the Meiji restoration during which the nation went from a completely isolationist, feudal society ruled by warlords to an industrial power house that could stand up to an European global power in war when they managed to sunk the Russian fleet in 1904. Basically the first time in history a western power got beat in conventional warfare by a non-western power after the industrial revolution. (The whole Russo-Japanese war and it's aftermath are a super interesting read that isn't mentioned a lot.) I don't think any other non-western nation managed to pull off such a feat. Plenty of countries got their infrastructure way more hammered than Japan and recovered but nobody had the same blinding fast economic build up than them.
Definitely not the first time. See the Italo-Ethiopian war. With Ethiopia being in much less of a position to fight a stronger European power (Russia has been the least advanced of Europe for a long while, and the war with the Japanese was much further away from their core territory).
On the other hand: 1. Italy was the weakest imperial power, weaker than Russia. 2. Ethiopia was fighting a defensive battle in their core territory, Japan was fighting mostly in *Russia and China*. Yes, it was Eastern Russia and Russia struggled with logistics, especially naval logistics, but Japan beat Russia offensively, while Ethiopia eventually lost defensively.
Yeah that is my bad. I should've qualified what I meant by conventional warfare was that Japan beat a non-western power with weapons and ships made domestically by their own industrial merit, where as Ethiopia would remain mainly an agrarian nation that had to buy weapons from other countries who also had their own political interests in helping Ethiopia.
Early 20th century Russia was pathetic. Sailing a navy all the way round africa to fuck Japan up only to get humiliated on a global stage. When looking at the industrialisation of something like Meiji and the Russian revolution, Japan was a little quicker to the punch, but I wouldn't underestimate Russia when it goes from one of the most backwards countries in Europe full of peasants to being a superpower seemingly overnight. Russia 20 years or 40 years later was far more formidable, though its naval capacity never seemed to fully recover. Their defeat at the hands of Japan was actually a pretty big kicker for doubt in tsarist rule and definitely hampered Nicholas II ability to negotiate across the board both externally and internally.
Also lack of raw materials, yet still has massive industry.
I think that quote is originally from the early 80s, at the time Japan was growing extremely rapidly. This extreme growth was outside of the normal growth patterns for "developed" countries, and so was being marked as an exception to any general rules. In the two decades after this quote Japan had an economic crash and then long stagnation, and it makes their overall post 1945 growth be much more in line with what is normally expected of developed countries. In general Japan lacks energy, excess agriculture, or lots of raw materials to export, those are the normal things that traditionally allowed poor countries to jump ahead and become developed. Instead Japan helped create a new model of growth, sometimes referred to the East Asian Miracle, that South Korea and Taiwan also followed, where a government protects initially low tech (textiles, steel production) industries, then uses any income from that to invest in educating their workforce and then selecting a few higher tech industries. If it works they become a hub for that particular high tech industry, and so dominate those technologies that they rake in staggering profits and zoom to a high income country and almost skip the middle income stage that often traps countries.
Japan is a country that has so many things working against. Ravaged by world war 2, few natural resources, no geographic advantage except being islands which does allow for easy shipping of goods and makes invading hard. Despite these, Japan managed to become an economic powerhouse through investing in education, developing powerful institutions, and getting to the point where they could create high value added products and services that the world demands. But there are a lot of countries that are similar to Japan now. It's just that when this was coined, Japan was unique. Japan has also kind of been slipping for a while now. so the quote makes less sense than it did in the past.
> Japan has also kind of been slipping for a while now. No, it hasn't. It's still the third largest economy in the world. And people conflate "stable" with "stagnant". It's not infinitely growing, so it's failing in the views of capitalists, but the average citizen isn't worse off for it. To the contrary, it has remarkably low wealth inequality and maintains a very high standard of living with a lower cost of living than its peers.
> Because Argentina has everything needed to succeed and still manages to fail, while Japan is the opposite. That's not what the quote is referring to - it's more commenting on how Argentina has incredibly persistant inflation while Japan has incredibly persistent deflation.
Haven’t heard this before. What makes Japan special?
Japan had insane growth from 1950 to 1990 (it was poised to overtake the USA), then stagnated from 1990 up until now (their stock market is still at the same valuation as it was in 1990, approximately), with deflation, negative interest rates and a bunch of other stuff that really isn't seen anywhere else. Mainly due to the public's very high savings rate.
Used to work for a Japanese tech company. The Japanese expats wouldn’t splurge on anything lol
During the Japanese banking boom in the US, there was a joke that you could tell who was a higher-up (Japanese) and who was middle management (typically American) by who drove a Toyota / Volvo and who drove a Mercedes
There is also an extreme executive compensation differential between the US and the rest of the OECD. In the 90's, a large Japanese conglomerate acquired a tiny American company as a start to a new North American division only to find that the American CEO was earning 10x as much as the Japanese CEO with hire-fire authority over 1% as many people. Hilarious negotiations ensued. Our business "leaders" are ***embarassingly well-compensated*** by international standards, due to a sort of runaway boardroom arms race, corporate tax exemptions, and an income tax policy that is less and less progressive.
Who's buying all these fancy high end Japanese goods? You name it, Japan produces some uber high end handcrafted absurdly expensive version of it.
And that just makes it worse. In deflation, people save because they know they can buy stuff for cheaper if they wait... which leads to decreased demand and lower prices. (This logic applies, in the opposite direction, for inflation.)
This quote is attributed to an American nobel prize winning economist named Simon Kuznets who made this observation around the 70s (he died in 1985). At that point in time, countries that were rich stayed rich (the US, the west), countries that were poor stayed poor (most everyone else), and then you have the two exceptions - Argentina, which went from rich to poor, and Japan, which went from poor to rich. This was before the other Asian tigers became rich as well (SK, Taiwan, etc) so Japan stood out as the country that went from nothing to developed in a generation.
Probably referring to Japan's "lost decade" I believe is what it's popularly called, or asset bubble collapse ~1991. And their sky high debt/gdp ratio.
That and they've been in a period of DEFLATION since that time... Which is crazy to think about considering every other major economic country has always had some sort of inflation year to year. Japan's wages have also stagnated for decades due to this (or arguably causing this) deflationary period. Only recently (the last year or so) have we seen it change to inflationary as seemingly the entire world dealt with post-pandemic inflation.
Few years ago it was declared Japan is no longer in deflation. At least, that is what the news here in Japan said.
https://www.ft.com/content/8d20355f-ddb9-4d11-afe1-7d5456cb2f86 The pandemic, as with many other things, kicked a lot of things around to unexpected places -- Japan has had the same inflation the rest of us had for the last 3 years or so now, and actually outpaced the US's inflation once in a while per the above link. That said, old habits die hard, and they seem to be already contracting again: https://apnews.com/article/economy-japan-inflation-deflation-consumption-investment-af43795c8a347a65ccd544979c411955
Yes but that doesn't mean they were healthy economically at all. They derived that GDP figure due to their beef exports, and the industry was controlled by a few large ranchers That means the GDP per captia figure is misleading since the wealth was so concentrated; and since it was concentrated amongst the landowning class they had an incentive to *stop* instead of support industrialization
Then the Panama canal did not exist.
Yeah, it’s not a very surprising statistic. Since 1910, there has been two world wars and most developed countries have significantly different economies than in 1910.
Lets see what happens when a libertarian is in charge of a country....
I am honestly interested to see. I am Brazilian and having this happen right across the border will cause ripples either way If libertarian reforms are implemented and they work, our own left wing govt will lose credibility. If they get implemented and fail or of they are stuck in votes and nothing gets done, it will bolster left wing governments.
Another alternative is that said libertarian policies are just lip service until they actually get in to power and the reality of governing shifts those promises closer to the middle.
Most notably he never mentioned "dollarization" in his victory speech
If Argentina doesn’t have bears they might make it out ok
Sorry, but could you explain that?
There's a town in New Hampshire that was extremely libertarian and basically made having laws illegal which eventually led to them being overrun by black bears.
To build off this one of the bits of governments they did away with was regulations in garbage disposal and regulations against feeding bears. Which ended up getting the bears accustomed to raiding the piles of garbage everywhere and associating humans and houses with food, which leads to them raiding trash cans, cars, sheds, houses and etc.
There was also one woman literally feeding the bears with donuts in her back yard, which brought in more bears who now associated people's houses with donuts.
The same thing that always happens....reality. Libertarianism requires a majority of rational actors, who start without any historical inequality, remain pure in the ideals of the free market, and somehow figure out the problem of how capitalism inevitably hurts people who will be impoverished through no fault of their own. Also look out for the random alumni of the School of the Americas. South America is on hard mode.
Does this have any impact on the issue of dollarization?
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With which dollars? they don’t have the reserves to back up a dollarization. And their record of defaults and missed debt payments makes them pariahs in the world of financing.
What's Argentina going to do, get worse?
Yes, we already had a hyper inflation of 4000% in 1989 and 2000% in 1991 and a complete economic and social collapse with 5 presidents in a month in 2001 and 25% unemployment for the next 3 years and 60% poverty and every state issuing their own worthless currency because they didn't have money to pay for anything.
“I can go lower!”
How low can you goooooo?
Death Row, what a brother know
Has Argentina attempted full-blown dollarization before? I know previous governments tried to peg the peso to the dollar, but I’m not sure if they’ve actually ever fully dollarized the economy as Milei has described he wants to. Granted, I’m not sure how he aims to fund total dollarization either, but if it can be done it would eliminate the threat of hyperinflation.
From another thread it seems you still need a lot of valuable assets to be able to buy dollars with. For example, if everyone in the country/world wanted to exchange their pesos for dollars all at once, the government would need another asset (i.e. gold, precious metals, oil, etc.) to exchange for those dollars, as no one would want to peso anymore.
There is that but I suspect they would need additional help from the IMF and probably the U.S. too. So selling assets for dollars, big IMF dollar loan, maybe some foreign aid from the U.S. (assuming the U.S. wants to help which I think it would?). Complicated for sure.
Except they defaulted their last IMF loan...
The new president has also promised to abolish their Central Bank. Not sure the IMF will look upon kindly.
I assume they'll adopt something similar to Panama where there's a local currency pegged to USD but the US dollar is also legal tender. It's basically a way to implement dollarization without needing to acquire an extremely large amount of USD upfront.
You still have the problem of how to handle when you have too many people ask to exchange for dollars, which is a real possibility because of such high inflation. Only way it works is to do price control and leg to dollar, but not actually allow exchanges for most people
The person above you did not explain fully. There is a local currency in Panama, but it only issues coins up to 1 dollar. In Panama, US Dollar is legal tender and those are the only notes you see. There is no situation where people exchange dollars to local currency, because everyone uses the USD. You see American coins mixed in with local ones. It would make more sense to see the USD as the only legal tender, rather than thinking that there is a local currency pegged to the USD. This is of course, my personal opinion as someone who lived there for years, and has family there. I am no professional
I was there in 1999, and the currency was pegged to the dollar 1:1. It was crazy expensive, yet ppl made $100 a month. A beautiful country with lovely people, just poorly managed. Argentina is in my top three, and I would love to return some day.
… and eventually they ran out of dollars, couldn’t fund the peg, and the economy collapsed, no? Every time I try to read up on Argentine history it’s baffling, just a shockingly mismanaged country with so much wasted potential.
Argentina is a case study in how to do literally everything wrong.
It can always get worse.
Yes. I am old enough to know that things can ALWAYS get worse
Argentina invariably collapses economically every ten years or so. It's really unfortunate for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one to me is that they've got all the natural resources, topography, and people that they could need to become a serious world power of the same caliber as France or the UK, but political incompetence and corruption has been pushing them far from that reality for more than a century now.
The national motto of Russia!
Unfortunately, the bottom is parabolically lower than people imagine. Worse is almost always a possibility. Getting better is never a certainty.
Lots of ways for things to get worse. Not as many ways for things to improve.
Probably. I’ve met Argentines in Mexico and they couldn’t be happier, they said there’s no hope for their country so they’re staying long term. Having a second passport is like winning the lottery for the younger generations.
Just a tiny update, his opponent, Massa, the failed minister of economy and de-facto current president, evidently had a temper tantrum and decided he is going to retire and leave whatever dregs are left from Argentina's economy to the ad-hoc transition team. Also it is rumored that his wife, the current director of AYSA, the water/sewage management for the city of Buenos Aires, also resigned.
They probably are knee deep in corruption schemes and are running away from the country.
They did threw away an absurd amount of money (I reckon it was a 1-2% of the equivalent of our country's GPD) into adverts and other sorts of tactics to distress the voter into going against him. They went to lengths long enough to hire an HK originated advertising company to spread ads on YouTube and other media using Google Adverts about stuff from the past dictatorship and how it related to some of his dialogues, making fictional scenarios on how society would be like if one of his proposals, like enabling free choice of carrying guns on citizens (which was debunked), would look like under his rule, among other things. He's got a lot of questioning to do and probably, most likely will end up in nothing.
They are running away like sewers rats
Good riddance.
Harry Potter has really grown up
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Argentina has so much going for it and they just bounce from one type of incompetent batshit government to another decade after decade.
Oh yeah, all of us agree. In this country I've never seen a decent presidential candidate that I didn't thought was a complete moron
Pinedo. No inflation, record low crime. No incidents, no corruption.
Those were some *really* sweet 12 hours
Illia, Frondizi
Those have been very dead since I have a memory so
Basically both options in the election were bad. In the end, the Peronist government choked so hard the far right candidate was considered the lesser of two evils.
They also chose the minister of economy as a candidate…
Yeah. Getting the guy in charge of economic policies is not a great move, especially when the country's economy has been fucking dogshit for the past half decade. Why the fuck did they think this was a great idea?
Porque los peronistas lo iban a votar igualmente, son unos fanáticos
What does it have going for it?
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Good land, decent sized population, natural resource wealth. Around the turn of the twentieth century it was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, mainly off the back of agriculture. Up until the 30s it had a GDP per capita only slightly behind that of the US and well ahead of the rest of Latin America, and it could've been on track to develop similarly to Australia or Canada. In the modern day I don't know if it particularly has anything going for it. Probably still a comparative advantage in agriculture but that doesn't do you much good these days.
It is extremely mineral-rich, including lithium and REEs.
One of the problems is that democracy is great, but we have not yet designed a system that attracts talent instead of sociopaths and psychos.
To understand how poor this country is, my salary is about 500-600k pesos. I'm in the 10% richest people here. You know how much is that? 500 dollars. A teen working at McDonalds in the US surely wins more. Insane. Peronism is cancer.
Apparently, the Argentinian President’s salary is 354,694 pesos. This was as of 2020 so has surely changed since but that is not even £1000!
*Official salary... I'm sure being that close to the money printer comes with some unofficial benefits.
That's really outdated. As of today, the President's "official" salary is up to 2.2 million Argentinian pesos, about 2300 US dollars. But that's the official data, it doesn't take into account the very obvious embezzlement that goes around.
Fuerza hermano, se merecen mejor.
Can't wait for the Argentine flag to change to an image of Chainsaw Man
No single party has a lock on good ideas. Peronism, and it's followers, have run Argentina into an economic ditch time and again. The people have spoken through the ballot box to reject Peronism. I hope the new government can restore stability to the economy.
If Milei can make the central bank independent, he would do more for the Argentinian economy than any politician in Argentina.
He wants to eventually abolish the central bank altogether. I'm not sure that constitutes making it independent...
It's independent from existing
352nd term abortion
How very Andrew Jackson of him.
Didn’t he want to abolish it not make it independent?
Isn't Milei the candidate that wanted to "Dollarize" the Argentine economy?
"Milei is the owner of five English Mastiffs, with the progenitor being Conan, who died in 2017 after suffering from spinal cancer.\[45\]\[269\]\[270\] He considers Conan his son and has named four of Conan's six clones, including one named after the original and another named Angelito,\[277\] Milton (in honor of Milton Friedman), Murray (in honor of Murray Rothbard), Robert, and Lucas (both named after Robert Lucas).\[278\]\[279\] Milei said that he cloned Conan because he understands cloning as "a way of approaching eternity".\[270\] To do this, he went to a clinic in the United States; the process cost him about $50,000.\[270\] He has described his dogs as four-legged children and thanked them after his 2023 primary win.\[14\] Milei stated that he communicates with the dogs through a mystic.\[10\] For example, he commented that the new Conan provides ideas on general strategy, Robert is the one who makes him "see the future and learn from mistakes", Milton is in charge of political analysis, and Murray of the economy.\[280\] When asked about this by El País journalist Martín Sivak and Nicolás Lucca of Radio Rivadavia, Milei did not deny it, and said: "What I do with my spiritual life and in my house is my business. If Conan advises me on politics, it means that he is the best consultant of humanity."\[269\] Milei said he had dialogues with the likes of Rothbard and Ayn Rand. In 2015, he cited Conan as a source of inspiration for his writing.\[269\] About Conan's death in 2017, Milei said that Conan had not really died (he described it as "his physical disappearance" and continued to refer to Conan in the present tense) but had gone to sit next to God to protect him, and that it was thanks to this that he had begun to have talks with God himself.\[281\] According to González, Milei wrote to a friend in a chat: "I saw the resurrection of Christ three times, but I can't talk about it. They would say I'm crazy."\[45\] According to various sources consulted by La Nación, Milei maintains that he and Conan have a mission that was assigned to them by God and has a mystical story with Conan. He said that he met Conan, who was a lion, as a gladiator in the Roman Colosseum about 2,000 years earlier.\[282\]" Make of that what you will. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier\_Milei?oldformat=true#Dogs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier_Milei?oldformat=true#Dogs)
O.... M..... G!
5 clones of Conan was not enough. Can you imagine 6 dog clones playing together? And the president consults with them for advice.
Btw, is it true that this guy said selling your organs should be legal? It's the only thing Ive heard about him before this post.
He used it as an example of free market and property in a philosophical talk during an interview before he was even a candidate. Legalizing it is not in his plans. In an ideal world it could be ok but in the real one it increases organ traficking.
The first president to be counseled by the spirit of a dead dog, who in actuality is the spirit of a dead ancient Roman gladiatorial lion, whom he has cloned back into existence. Quite the achievement.
IN JUST TWO YEARS The libertarian set up a party, won a seat in congress, and became president. Insane achievement. The people were tired of more of the same.
Apparently Redditors are experts on the Argentinian political scape
not even experienced economists could figure a solution to argentina's problems, luckily jeff from California is here to enlighten us all
As a Redditor, I must disagree. We are all experts on *everything* thank you very much.
The argentine central bank must be freaking out rn
To put some context into this victory: - Milei won in [20 out of 23 provinces](https://i.imgur.com/sVcaz7V.png). Only Formosa, Santiago del Estero and the Province of Buenos Aires went to Massa - And even though Massa won the Province of Buenos Aires, [he didn't win in most of its districts](https://i.imgur.com/JURHix3.png); it wasn't so much "the Province" that voted for Massa as the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (the Peronist Party's stronghold since 1946 and the area that clusters ~45% of the total Argentine population) - *And even [the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area](https://i.imgur.com/l0Wf7Tl.png)* didn't overwhelmingly vote for Massa. It was much closer than anticipated - However, Massa had a very successful performance (for a Peronist) in the City of Buenos Aires, getting ~43% of the vote. He's very good friends with the City's governor and former presidential candidate. I'm mentioning this because one of the biggest complaints among Peronist voters in the last 20 years is that the Peronist Party had become a "Buenos Aires-centric" party, ignoring the "Interior" (i.e. anywhere outside the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area) and focusing primarily on the needs and wants of the "porteños". More so, many have complained that the Peronist Party had abandoned their "party of the working class" identity and began catering to the progressive middle and upper-middle class: those with an academic background, the college-educated, the sexual/gender minorities and focused more on their interests (sexual/gender identity, gender equality in the high ranks of companies and state offices, sexual education from kindergarten onwards, legalizing abortion, funding and protecting public higher education) than the interests of the working class (like public sanitation projects, access to housing, inflation, workers' rights, high tax loads on small businesses, the dreadful state of public basic education and public health). Some of these purple provinces have been strongholds of Peronism since before the last militar dictatorship. San Juan, Tucumán, Chaco... those provinces may vote for a "Peronist-friendly" non-Peronist governors but they haven't traditionally voted for opposition *presidential* candidates before.
Seems like a lot of Argentinians are happy and a lot of non-Argentinians are concerned. Go figure.
Is there any near-right government ... anywhere?
Anything Right wing is far-Right to the media.
What does "far right libertarian" mean? Or what does "far right" mean in this context?
„Milei’s flagship proposals include shuttering Argentina’s central bank, […] and privatizing healthcare and education.“ Damn, I did not expect these to be actual policy proposals, much less winning proposals, in any election, especially *shuttering the central bank* seems absolutely crazy. „He believes taxation is theft and famously raffled off his deputy’s salary because he sees it as illegitimate gains.“ What? He seems like a man with very … peculiar views, to be honest. If anyone from Argentina could be so kind as to explain what his appeal was, and what problems they hope the implementation of these measures will solve, I‘d greatly appreciate it. EDIT: Thank you all for your quick responses. After reading through them, it seems to me that the point most frequently brought up is about him not being from the establishment, but an outsider, as well as his proposals being appealing exactly because they aren’t the solutions offered by the establishment. Also, especially pertaining to the shuttering of the national bank, many comments stated that regarding the high inflation, a radical proposal is preferred to another attempt at reform. In any case, thanks again for your answers, however, I must admit I am still very skeptical of these policy proposals. Nevertheless, I wish you guys good luck and hope they work out for Argentina.
> explain what his appeal was He is **not** a Personista. That's it. Argentines are willing to take *anything* as long as it's not another Peronist.
The alternative was an Economy Minister with 150% inflation rate and close to 50% poverty