Argentina’s return to the West
Argentina’s repudiation of the Brics is more than a minor earthquake in global diplomacy. It has broken the spell of an ever-widening bloc of states pitted against the Western liberal order.
Momentum has been all one way since the original quartet of Brazil, Russia, India and China launched the bloc in 2009, later expanded to South Africa, and then Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia and the Emirates at the start of this year.
“The West is in real danger, that is why we have to stick together,” said President Javier Milei.
“My priority is to be an ally of the United States. I will not negotiate with communists,” he declared after winning the election in November. To near universal surprise, his actions have been swift, dramatic and fully aligned with his words.
The Biden administration can hardly conceal its delight that a country so often in the vanguard of Latin America’s intellectual and political fashion has switched sides.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 10 May 2024
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/10/javier-milei-argentina-china-xi-jinping-brics/
Argentina’s extreme experiment in Austrian economics is sailing dangerously close to the wind
The president’s revolution is less Thatcherite than his rhetoric would suggest
Scratch deeper and the Austrian story starts to unravel. The rhetoric is a blend of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and Friedman’s Money Mischief but the policies so far are a Latin American stew of state meddling.
Plans to abolish the central bank and dollarise the economy have been shelved.
“Milei is doing the opposite of what he said would do. He sold everybody liberalism but he is actually pursuing highly-interventionist policies,” said professor Roberto Cachanovsky, author of the Argentine Syndrome.
“There is no economic strategy. The austerity plan is simply not to pay any money to anybody. There has been a brutal reduction in state spending that doesn’t seem to follow any logic. At some point the roads and the trains are going to fail,” he said.
“Milei came out like a rockstar and the people believed him. But his remedies are as old as the hills. If the plan is just to freeze public spending in nominal terms, Milei is going to become the most hated man in the country,” he told La Nacion.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 16 May 2024
Internationella valutafonden (IMF) har enats med Argentinas regering om ett nytt lånepaket till landet på 792 miljoner dollar motsvaraande cirka 8,6 miljarder kronor,
SvD/TT 14 maj 2024
https://www.svd.se/a/JbopPP/argentina-far-lanepaket-av-imf
Libertarian Milei’s Argentina is fast becoming the Texas of Latin America
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/05/libertarian-mileis-argentina-is-fast.html
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