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xtruss · 1 year ago

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The Free-Market Fundamentalism of Argentina’s Javier Milei

The President-Elect, a Right-Wing Populist with Authoritarian Instincts, has been Compared to Donald Trump, but his Radical Views on the Economy Set him Apart.

— By John Cassidy | November 21, 2023

Javier Milei, A Fifty-Three-Year-Old Economist, initially attracted attention by appearing on a late-night show. Source Photograph by Tomas Cuesta/Getty Images

On Monday, as political analysts (and many Argentines) anxiously sought to digest the election of the far-right firebrand Javier Milei as the next President of South America’s second-largest economy, investors cheered. In New York, prices of Argentinean stocks and bonds rose sharply, with the value of Y.P.F., an oil and gas company that is majority-owned by the state, closing up forty per cent. “This is the opportunity for a new beginning,” Jorge Piedrahita, the founder of Gear Capital Management, told Bloomberg.

Argentina could certainly do with a fresh economic start. A century ago, after the development of steamships first enabled the export of beef and other perishable products to Europe and North America, its G.D.P. per capita was comparable to many Western European countries. Today, it lags far behind them. Since 2000, it has defaulted on its sovereign debt on three occasions. During the past couple of years, a lengthy drought has devastated the country’s agricultural sector. The economy has fallen into a recession, and the inflation rate has reached 142.7 per cent. Four out of ten Argentines are living in poverty, and, in the past four years, the value of the Argentine peso has fallen by more than ninety per cent against the U.S. dollar.

Milei, a fifty-three-year-old economist, initially attracted attention by appearing on a late-night television show. He blamed Argentina’s political class for the country’s economic woes and promised to blow things up. Although he directed much of his fire at the center-left Peronist parties that have been in power for much of the past twenty years, he also criticized the center-right government of Mauricio Macri, which was in office from 2015 to 2019, for not being conservative enough. If he was elected, he told voters, he would slash government spending, cut taxes, make a bonfire of government regulations, replace the Argentine peso with the U.S. dollar, and abolish most government agencies, including the Central Bank. “Today marks the end of decadence in Argentina,” he declared at his victory party.

Some accounts have compared Milei to Donald Trump as a right-wing populist with authoritarian sympathies. (He has downplayed the crimes of the military dictatorship that murdered thousands of Argentines between 1974 and 1983.) When it comes to economics, however, the comparison falls short. Although Milei and Trump are both self-styled economic nationalists, the Argentinean has no time for the protectionism that Trump espouses, or for telling manufacturers where to situate their plants. The intellectual inspirations for Milei’s hard-line economic libertarianism include Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas, two illustrious University of Chicago economists, and Murray Rothbard, a less famous New Yorker who helped to introduce the Austrian school of free-market economics to the United States. (Milei owns five English mastiffs, four of which are named Milton, Robert, Lucas, and Murray; the fifth is called Conan, after the Barbarian.)

Milei grew up in Buenos Aires. After a short spell as a goalie for the professional soccer team Chacarita Juniors, he shifted to economics, obtaining two master’s degrees and working for several financial companies, including HSBC, the international bank. In a revealing interview with The Economist in September, Milei recalled how it was reading an article by Rothbard, who died in 1995, that turned him into an “anarcho-capitalist”—someone who believes that the economy should be organized purely based on private contracts, and that the welfare state is “the enemy.” Milei said that he was still an anarcho-capitalist, intellectually speaking, but that he also recognized some of the difficulties associated with putting this philosophy into action. So, in practical terms, he was a “minarchist”—a believer in making the state as small as possible by confining its functions to defense and law enforcement.

Milei’s free-market fundamentalism places him more in the ultra-Reaganite camp than in maga nation. In the Latin American context, he is the heir to General Pinochet’s Chicago Boys, who liberalized the Chilean economy during the nineteen-seventies and eighties at the point of a gun, and to Domingo Cavallo, the neoliberal Argentinean minister of the economy who pegged the peso to the dollar in the nineties. However, it is one thing to espouse radical ideas as an economic commentator or a protest candidate. Putting them into effect is another, especially in a country as divided as Argentina.

The hurdles that Milei faces are formidable. Having ruled out implementing his policies by Presidential decree, he will have to get them through the bicameral legislature, which is dominated by the parties of the center-right and center-left. Even if Macri’s party, Together for Change, were to support Milei’s proposals in the lower house, he would still need to win over some of the Peronists in the Senate. That seems unlikely.

Javier Milei, President elect, Argentina Government

Licentiate in Economics, Universidad de Belgrano, Argentina; two Master's in Economics, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and CEDES/IDES. Former: Head Economist, Estudio Broda and Máxima AFJP; Senior Economist, HSBC, Argentina; Adviser of the Argentine Government, ICSID. Currently, Head Economist, Corporación América. B-20/G-20 Adviser and Member, Group of Economic Policy, ICC/G-20. Since 2012, leads the division of Economic Studies, Fundación Acordar, a think tank of national scope. For more than 20 years, University Professor of Macroeconomics, Economics of Growth, Microeconomics and Mathematics for Economists. Has written over 50 academic papers.

Given these political realities, Milei may struggle to push through the harsh austerity policies that he has called for, which include cutting pensions and anti-poverty programs. There are also serious questions about his signature policy proposal: dollarization. His intellectual argument for it is straightforward. He claims that a main root cause of Argentina’s inflation problems is that politicians of all parties, when faced with economic challenges, routinely resort to the printing press. Abolishing the Argentine Central Bank and making U.S. dollars the only legal currency would close off the inflationary option and force the government to balance its books, he says. Three other Latin American countries, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Panama, have dollarized their economies, but they are much smaller than Argentina.

Milei points to Argentina’s experience in the early nineties, when Cavallo, serving under President Carlos Menem, responded to hyperinflation by making the peso fully convertible and setting up a currency board to protect the peg. Within a couple of years, the inflation rate declined from more than a thousand per cent to less than twenty per cent. Milei’s only criticism of Cavallo’s convertibility policy is that it kept pesos in circulation, and it could therefore be reversed, which happened in 2002. Under his dollarization plan, Argentines would eventually have to swap all of their pesos for dollars.

There are many potential problems with Milei’s proposal, beginning with a very basic one: right now, Argentina doesn’t have the dollars it would need to dollarize its economy. Net foreign-exchange reserves at the country’s Central Bank are negative, according to analysts, which means it owes more money in foreign currencies than it possesses. “Dollarizing without dollars is like saying you want the entire population to wear Nike sneakers, even though you don’t make them and you don’t have the resources to buy them,” Alejandro Werner, a former senior official at the International Monetary Fund, remarked to Bloomberg a couple of months ago. “It’s impossible.”

Emilio Ocampo, an economist and historian who is advising Milei, argues that the dollar shortage is more apparent than real. “Argentines have more than US$200 billion in dollar bills stashed away in safe deposit boxes at banks or at home ‘under the mattress,’ ” Ocampo wrote recently. “This . . . reflects spontaneous dollarization.” Despite this stash of dollars, however, almost all experts believe that, to make his plan work, Milei’s government would need to borrow a large sum of dollars from abroad. Milei, too, has acknowledged the dilemma: “If someone comes and gives me the $30bn in cash, I can solve it in one day,” he said, in the Economist interview. “If they don’t give me the $30bn cash, I won’t solve it in one day.”

Where could Milei get the dollars he needs? Argentina already owes the International Monetary Fund more than forty billion dollars, most of which was provided during Macri’s Presidency. As a result, getting the Washington-based lender to finance the dollarization plan seems like a long shot, at best. In recent years, China has also supplied a lot of hard currency to Argentina, but Milei is a fervent anti-Communist. He wants to align Argentina with the U.S. and Israel. (He also says that he’s considered converting from Roman Catholicism to Judaism.)

Even if dollarization did turn out to be feasible, it could prove disastrous over time. In the late nineties, when Cavallo’s dollar peg was still in place, a surge in the value of the dollar (and, therefore, the peso) contributed to Argentina’s exports becoming uncompetitive in world markets. The economy plunged into a deep recession, and capital started to flee the country. After Cavallo returned to office in 2001, capital flight accelerated, and he eventually ordered banks to limit cash withdrawals. In December, 2001, riots broke out in Buenos Aires and other cities. Cavallo resigned. So did the President, Fernando de la Rúa. Shortly after that, Argentina defaulted on its debts and eventually abandoned the currency peg.

The lesson was one that many Western governments learned in the decades after the First World War, when they insisted on restoring the nineteenth-century gold standard. Rigid monetary regimes, though they may provide an effective counter-inflationary anchor, rob countries of the ability to respond to economic shocks, internal and external. Also, in abolishing the Central Bank, full dollarization would deprive Argentina of a lender of last resort, which would make its financial system even more fragile.

“Dollarisation is a potentially perilous ‘no exit’ strategy,” Mark Sobel, a former senior official at the U.S. Treasury Department and a former U.S. representative at the I.M.F., wrote in a piece about Milei’s proposals. “It could sow the seeds for a huge contraction and crash, while deflecting attention from the tough work of fixing the economy.” Mark Weisbrot, a Latin America expert at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank, wrote that, even though Argentina was facing serious economic problems, “a crazed, economically suicidal approach would only make things worse—and as Argentina has experienced, things can get a lot worse.”

That’s assuming Milei’s plan goes into effect, of course. But his weak position in the legislature means that many of his proposals, including the dollarization plan, “are unlikely to see the light of day, at least in the short term,” Michael Stott, the Latin America editor of the Financial Times, commented on Monday. Will a figure like Milei, who campaigned with a chainsaw, bow to the elected politicians he has described as “thieves”? In his interview with The Economist, he said that if the legislature blocks his proposals, “then we plan to go to referendums for structural reforms that we consider fundamental.” It seems like Milei will not be easily diverted from his radical agenda. ♦

#Argentina 🇦🇷 | Free Markets | Libertarianism | Economics #Politics #South America #John Cassidy #The New Yorker

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rodolfoparras · 2 months ago

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And for you, I keep my legs apart (and forget about my tainted heart)

Pairing: Unspecified Male character x Male Reader

cw: 18+, age gap, (older man x younger male reader), anal fingering, riding, subtop male reader, dombot male character, size kink

Thinking about an old man going for a guy like you who definitely isn’t his type, with your scrawny frame, short height that barley reaches eye level on him, and with a meek presence that couldn’t even scare away a stray cat if you desperately tried to do so.

Yet you’ve somehow managed to gather the courage to buy someone like him- a man that could probably be your father or something, a drink. At least that’s what he thinks you’re doing. It’s hard to tell when you’re talking so much - well nervously rambling that is, about the interior choices made for the dingy bar and the nutritious value of their menu (fuck who cares?)

But he listens to you anyway while his eyes trail along your lanky frame, eyeing your every little reaction to him (What ? He’s bored and he has no interest in the mind numbing football game playing on the television nor the group of rowdy men who look like they’re on a mission to drink themselves to an early death)

So he watches; watches how you jump when your fingers accidentally brush, watches how you avoid eye contract when he leans in close to your ear to ask you something, watches how you stumble over your words when he laughs or smiles at something you said.

At some point he watches you start squirming around in your seat and that’s when he notices the outline of your boner showing through your ill fitting jeans (Jesus Christ, this is what you’ve been hiding kid?) Despite being in a dimly lit bar he can tell you’ve opted out of wearing briefs, cockhead firmly pushing against your jeans and casting a dark spot that’s probably the reason as to why you’re squirming around in your seat

Now it’s his turn to jump as your knees knock together, gaze avoiding yours because how is he supposed to look you in the eyes when he’d been shamelessly staring at your crotch? and now he’s the one who can’t get through a sentence without stumbling over his words because all he can think about is all the ways he could cum with the help of your cock.

It doesn’t take much before he’s inviting you back to his house.

For a moment you look surprised by the invite, probably haven’t expected that and truth be told he’s surprised himself since he usually isn’t one for one night stands and if he were to do one it would be in a cheap motel not in such an intimate space like his place. But something about you has him acting like a horny teenager who’d just seen their first pair of tits.

You’re quick to accept the offer though, even thanking him for inviting you into his home (such a strange thing to do but somehow he can’t help but be endeared by the gesture)

Well at his place you continue your nervous blabbering, talking about his choice of decor or lack there of (fuck you love to talk don’t you?) while he continues thinking about all the ways he’s going to cum tonight.

Eventually he leans in for a kiss, swiftly cutting off your blabbering, tongue slipping past your lips to and tasting the sweet drink you’d been sipping.

A breathy sigh escapes your lips, hips bucking against his and he can’t help but notice the way your hard cock is firmly pressing against him.

“Christ, take this off kid,” he breathes against your lips and tugs at the belt you’re wearing, watches in amusement as you practically yank it off of your body along with the pair of pants you’re wearing.

Once you’ve complety stripped down he can finally see what he’d been eyeing all night and yeah he was right, you’re big, bigger than anyone he’s taken before, cock girthy and curving past your belly button, with an angry vein protruding to the side and a heavy set of balls hanging between your thighs.

And in that very moment he can’t help but thank everything under the sun for having decided to wear a plug to the bar, hole twitching in anticipation at the thought of all the ways he’s going to be skewed onto your cock.

Just as he’s about to tug his own shirt off, you go to speak before swiftly halting yourself.

“What? You’re not about to tell me you’re a virgin are you?” He says, in a joking tone something that quickly fades into something more serious as you continue to stand there staring at him without saying a word.

Suddenly he feels like he’s been splashed with a bucket of ice cold water and the first thing on his mind is to tell you take your clothes and get out because he’s not fucking a virgin tonight, that’s for damn sure. However just as he’s about to utter those words you manage to splutter out a response.

“Nonono I’m not but-,” you try to say, hand aimlessly flailing in the air before you continue speaking . “…I just I- won’t last long.”

That’s when he laughs, a long hearty laugh, that has his head tipping back, hand clutching onto his stomach and he knows he should feel bad for laughing so much but he just hadnt expected those words to come out your mouth

When he finally manages to gather himself you’re looking absolutely flustered, hands fisting your clothes and looking like you’re about to sprint out of here and he can’t help but want to take you out of your miserry

“don’t worry about it kid, just sit down for me yeah?”He says, nods his head over to his worn out blue couch: the one he usually sits in to drink his morning tea, the one he usually falls asleep in while watching reruns of some forgotten tv series , the one that is now adorned with a pretty boy with sugary sweet lips, cock hard and weeping between your legs, just patiently waiting for someone like him to come sit on it.

The thought itself is enough to kick him into gear and as he proceeds to strip the clothes off him he can’t help but notice the way your gaze follows him closely, an observation that stirs something foreign inside of him

It’s been a while since someone looked at him like this -like really looked at him, not with pity in their eyes because they know death’s patiently waiting at his side but with pure hunger, as you trail your gaze over every mark, every scar, every inch of skin he uncovers as he slowly takes his clothes off.

He can only take so much before he feels compelled to speak “Easy there, if you continue on like this you’ll finish before we get to do anything “

That seems enough to snap you out of your trance, looking absolutely flustered and once again he can’t help but be endeared by you (Christ, he really needs to get get it together)

“Still sure about this?” he says, and busies himself with rummaging around for the lube and condom he keeps in a drawer.

He only gets a meek hum in response and when he turns his head to look at you he sees your gaze focused on his lower half, probably eyeing the plug he’s got on.

The realization has his hole twitching in anticipation before he’s walking over to you with lube and a condom.

“Seriously has anyone ever told you it’s rude to stare?” He asks with a small smile on his face.

“‘M sorry-“ you begin to say before he leans down and cuts you off with a kiss, even hears a moan of his own escaping his own lips. He’s kissed many men before, that’s for sure. Some kisses had been snuck in dark bars others have been done in a drunken haze while in cheap motels.

But they’ve never felt like this- hungry, frantic almost leaving him weak at the knees as you thrust your tongue into him, sharp teeth nipping at tender skin , and hands wandering all over his body as if you can’t get enough of him.

It takes everything in him to break the kiss , and he hears a sound of protest escapes your lips, hand desperately clawing at his hips to pull him back in.

“that’s enough,” he says voice all firm but there’s nothing but warmth in his gaze as he peers down at you . “Got to save some of the fun remember ? Gonna let this old man ride your cock?”

“Yes yes yes please I’ll do anything just please-” you cry out, practically choking up on your words, while keeping a vice like grip on him.

“Shh easy there” he says, and gently nudges you back into the chair, before swiftly pulling the plug out of him.

A gasp escapes his lips as the cold air blows on sensitive skin, hungry hole now clenching around nothing. “Christ!”

Despite the strong desire to jump your bones- especially with the way you’re looking at him right now, he knows that he isn’t stretched enough for your cock.

So he tosses the condom your way before he opens the cap to the lube bottle and pours the content into his hand, fingers making quick work of warming it up for him.

It doesn’t take much before he’s got his slick finger pressed up against his rim, pushing it inside without much resistance as a soft exhale escapes his lips “you’re - ah you’re so big kid, can’t ah can’t take you like this”

He only hears a strangled sound escape your mouth as the words roll off of his tongue, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips as he works a second finger inside.

“Fuck me,” he breathes out, head tipping back, as waves of pleasure start running down his spine, all while you closely watch him the entire time.

And as a third finger joins into the mix he turns his eyes to look at you, noticing the way you’re looking at him all teary eyed, poor neglected cock weeping against your stomach and his voice is all hoarse as he says the words “you can touch yourself son it’s alright ”

You don’t waste a second wrapping a hand around your dick, erratically stroking from rot to tip as you keep your eyes glued to him. “Ah fuck! Feels - feels so good sir please ! Need- ah fuck need to fuck you please sir please”

“God you should see yourself kid, so pretty like this, so eager for an old man like me,” he breathes out, continues moving his fingers in and out, almost matching the pace of your own hand.

He wonders if this is how it would feel being speared onto your dick, fat cockhead nudging against his prostate with every thrust of your hips, his hungry hole taking your size as if it were nothing.

“Sir- going to cum please-“ he hears you cry out and the sound of your words snap him back into the present moment.

“Stop,”

A strangled sob escapes your lips, almost reluctant to pull your hand away from your dick but obedient as you are you listen to him.

Atta boy

He walks over to you on shaky legs, hand cupping your teary soaked face, slick thumb brushing over your cheek as he says “Want you to cum inside me, that alright with ya?”

You furiously nod your head in response looking so ridiculous he can’t help but chuckle before he turns around for you.

And as he stands there caged between your legs he can’t help but notice the warmth radiating from your skin, the smell of your cologne that’s biting at his nostrils, and the sweet sounds you’ve been making all night that are now trickling straight into his ear.

It’s only then he realizes how very real this is and how this isn’t just another dream his lonely mind had conjured up for him.

“Go easy on me alright? Been a while since I did this with someone,” he says, feels your cockhead circling his entrance before you slowly push inside of him.

“Jesus Christ!” He says through gritted teeth, face scrunching up, and nails clamping onto the couch as his body gets accustomed to the feeling of being stretched around your dick.

“Is this ah- is this alright sir?” You say, under a shaky breath, body quaking as you continue to sink inside of him.

“Going to tear me in half kid” he barks out, as the burn persist. Every nerve in his body is practically screaming as you continue to push your way inside of him but despite all of that there’s a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

Eventually he gets used to the stretch, the burning sensation dulling a bit as his body starts to relax “Fuck just like that, going to make me feel so good aren’t you?” He murmurs out, hands loosening their grip on the couch as he shuffles around to get more comfortable.

“Yes yes yes please want to be good for you god please I need-“ you slur out, and he feels your body violently shaking beneath him.

“Shhh easy there,” he coos out, voice a bit wobbly as you finally bottom out.

He makes a point to ignore the way you’re buried so deep he can feel your ballsack kissing his ass, and can practically taste you at the back of his mouth, just so he can help you out “Breathe in for me yeah?”

Without fail you do as he says “now breathe out for me okay?” Just like before you do as he says, body now much less tense and head relaxing in the crook of his neck.

He gives you a couple of moments to catch your breath before he slowly raises his hips and pushes them back down again. “Oh- oh mpfh fuck!”

“Go-god- so- so good sir” he hears you cry out as his hungry hole continues to swallow your cock.

And fuck if he doesn’t agree, feels as if the breath has been punched out of him with every thrust of his hips, knees already screaming in protest but being way too addicted to the feeling of your cockhead continuously jabbing at his prostate.

“Mhp! Feels so good kid, think- ah think I can feel you here” he grunts out, hand blindly searching for your own before placing it on the slick skin of his stomach. “Feel it,”

“Ah fuck! Sir please please want to make you feel good please!” You sob into his neck, unable to do anything but take it as he bounces on your dick.

“But you are,” he says, makes sure to puncture every word with a thrust of his hips “going to make me cum just like this,” and he really means it, doesn’t need a warm palm around his dick with the way heat’s already coiling in the pit of his stomach.

“Going to cum too,” you whine out, hips now meeting his thrust which catches him off guard.

“Fuck! Just like that, keep going,” he says through gritted teeth, the fire in his abdomen growing stronger and overtaking everything in his body as you continue to slam into him.

“Think I’m gonna” you splutter out, hips stuttering.

“Yeah you gonna come inside this old man? Come on then want to feel you,” he manages to say, as the world around him starts to blur out, ears ringing loud and before he knows of it you’re cumming , a loud moan tumbling past your mouth as you clutch onto him for dear life.

It doesn’t take much before he too reaches his orgasm.

“Ah fuck!” He cries out, body quaking in your lap as hot white ropes of cum spurt onto his stomach.

For a moment there are no words exchanged as the two of you take the opportunity to catch your breath but when you finally decide to speak the first thing you say is “so how about round two?”

His eyes widen in surprise before he bursts into laughter “you’re going to kill me you know that kid?”

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