Back when she was president, Cristina Fernández (CFK), her chief of staff, Aníbal Fernández, claimed that Argentina had less poverty than Germany. A popular Argentine joke is that he forgot to say “east.”
In 2015, it was obvious that Argentina was going to take a while to recover from the mess CFK left behind. I predicted it back in 2015: “Another commodity-price boom does not look probable. Inflation will have to be contained or run up to Venezuelan levels. In short, the new president is likely to be less-than-popular when the 2019 election rolls around.”
And I suggested that the best thing for CFK was for her allies to lose the 2015 election and come back in 2019 by running against the inevitably painful adjustment. Which is what she is trying to do!
I still suspect she will fail, but she has a decent shot. The good news is that Axel Kiciloff has been telling people that a new CFK administration will cooperate with the IMF, so there is a chance that she will govern more responsibly than in the past. But that is not how I would bet.
I sort of think that the elections, and the focusing of economic issues on the outcome of which, is overshadowing how dire Argentina's situation is, with respect to debt repayment, and the sheer dependence on external finance or export.
Posted by: shah8 | May 17, 2019 at 02:44 AM
This is a perspicacious analysis, and I wish to give credit where credit is due. Argentina's problems stem from two related problems:
(1) The place's history gives it little credibility;
(2) As Shah8 say, the place depends on external finance, because there is not enough internal savings.
If you could wave a magic wand and fix either one of those two things (not even both, just one), then Argentina would still have problems, but nothing like the ones it has been facing over the past three decades.
Posted by: Noel Maurer | November 08, 2019 at 06:58 PM