I would dearly love to believe that great things are happening in Argentina due to Milei's rule. But I also really respect Saifedean Ammous.
@didIplaywell, would you care to comment? And I'm not sure if you comment on Saifedean's substack, but if you believe so strongly in Milei, maybe you should. Because of course Saifedean has a huge audience, and if you have evidence to refute his claims, you should publish that evidence on his substack.
Excerpt from the article:
In my previous piece on Milei[1] 18 days ago, I argued that the Milei administration is running a debt and inflation ponzi that is coming near its end, and that the only concrete achievement of his administration so far is that it destroyed the currency and created a shitcoin casino making bond and foreign exchange speculation the only path to financial security in Argentina. Since I wrote that piece:
- The Argentine peso is down another 10% against the US dollar, and has already breached the top of the band in which the Administration said it aims to keep the peso.[2]
- This decline in the peso comes in spite of Milei's administration officially announcing it is intervening in the foreign exchange market by buying pesos with the very few borrowed dollars it has. It's estimated they blew $540m just last week. This was all to keep the exchange rate relatively stable in anticipation of yesterday's election.[3]
- The Treasury managed to sell all of its most recent bond auction, but that came only after raising the annual rates to a 88%, and by imposing new higher reserve requirements on banks, which made them have to buy more bonds. As a result, Argentine banks's stocks on the NYSE crashed.[4]
- Argentine stocks and bonds also crashed hard.
- Milei and his sister are implicated in a massive corruption scandal involving taking kickbacks from contracts for drugs for the disabled.[5]
- Milei's party lost regional elections yesterday to the Peronists.
In conclusion:
For two years, this con artist has doubled or tripled most measures of money supply, enriched bond market speculators, and kept the carry trade ponzi going, draining the country of money, all under the pretext that this was necessary to prevent the Peronists from coming back to power. He still lost his election, and will likely lose the congressional elections next month, too. His hysterical antics won't be in power for long, but all the extra pesos he created and the debt he incurred, will haunt Argentinians for many years to come.