1. Twenty years ago the inflation rate was about 5000 percent annually.
2. Argentina has been growing at nine percent for three years now.
3. By paying off its IMF debt, the central bank is trading in U.S. dollars for Argentina government bonds.
4. The current one-week repo rate is at 5 percent.
5. The price inflation rate is running about 12 percent.
6. Striking Buenos Aires subway workers asked for a 58 percent wage increase. They received a 22 percent boost but with the right to renegotiate in a few months’ time.
7. Nestor Kirchner, the President of Argentina, enjoys unprecedented approval ratings of 75 percent.
8. Kirchner has moved to build an alliance with Hugo Chavez.
9. Kirchner will not admit he has made any mistakes, and he is seeking greater control over judicial nominations, and perhaps over the media as well.
10. He is seeking to extend his emergency powers over this economy. Supermarkets had agreed to temporary price freezes, but these may be renewed and broader wage and price controls may be coming.
Would anyone care to guess the inflation rate in Argentina three years from now? On the positive side, the country is running a budget surplus (hey, maybe this would test the fiscal theory of the price level!?). For these facts, see The Wall Street Journal 22 December p.A12 and this excellent New York Times article.
You didn’t really think I was done blogging about this place, did you?
Wow, that’s scary business. With inflation rates like that, and similar expectations, I guess there’s very little incentive to save or hold onto cash?
Tyler, you have it wrong. Kirchner – along w/Hugo,
are the right men in the right place at the right
time to bring socialism into the 21st century, as
Hugo said.
Via Colby Cosh, an article from El Universal:
http://english.eluniversal.com/2005/12/29/
en_eco_art_29A649039.shtml
…Ideological framework
In a paper currently being distributed in pro-
government circles, titled “The role of social
production companies in the new productive model”,
the ideological grounds of EPS are outlined. “If
the government wants to conquer the second and
ultimate independence of the country, our challenge
in the ideological arena is even bolder: to make
citizens feel the collective sentiment, love their
neighbors as themselves, identify a common solution
to get out of the swamp of egocentrism, alienation,
lack of commitment and indifference, exacerbated by
neoliberal globalization.”…
Oh, yeah, it’ll work this time.
EPS are therefore essential to create “new” men and women within the framework of socialism for the next millennium.
Lord Kirchner, the tory. (This pretends to be ironic, but as seen in the facts, not
so far from truth)
Argentine president, Nestor Kirchner, strongly advocates central
planning and State control over the argentinean economy.
His policy’s most distincive sign is currency control, which is said to promote ‘industrial devolopment’ and agrarian exports of the country.
However, owing
to his 15-century mercantilist economic proyect, argentines are now forced
to pay extremely high prices for low-quality gadgets, clothing (‘fashionable’
argentinean t-shirts are more expensive than its Armani counterparts,
those you can find at outlets like ‘Armani Exchange’ in America), and even
argentine famous meat!
Since forced devaluation closes the economy and instead favors Argentina’s
almost-pre-modern landlords, ordinary middle-class consumers face a new
challenge: how not to disappear, not because of free market economics and
liberal capitalism as Marx once said, but because of so-called ‘progressive’
Nestor Kirchner’s proyect.
Countries who seriously endorse free market and globalisation
have developed their economies and now integrate the First World. Socialism
has never arised in those rich economies. However, former revolutionaries
of the seventies (now, ‘progressives’. I suggest you googling ‘montoneros’, ‘erp’) intend to sink capitalism not by acelerating
the capitalist accumulation process, but by interventing it in order to cause their desired effects. Now, this strategy implies a return to Mercantilism.
flyff money
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