An article in the Washington Post this weekend pointed out that some of Milei’s “revolutionary” ideas regarding the economy have actually been tried in Argentina and have failed. Do you think he will slightly modify or significantly change his approach? Or will he plunge straight ahead?
“As much as Milei likes to think otherwise, his views are not original. The last Argentine military dictatorship came to power with the slogan “Downsizing the state is making the nation bigger.” Its minister of economy, José Alfredo Martinez de Hoz, was a pre-Thatcher neoliberal who tried to deregulate the economy only for it to end up in disaster. In the 1990s, President Carlos Menem tried the same using a different political formula: He forced his own movement, Peronism, to embrace its historical nemesis, neoliberalism. His longest-serving minister of economy, Domingo Cavallo, deregulated the economy, while pegging the Argentine peso to the U.S. dollar to tame inflation. These policiesresulted in the dramatic crisis of 2001-2002, with private savings frozen, the peso devalued and more than half the country living under the poverty line.”
