The administration formally led by President Alberto Fernández but under the de facto control of Economy Minister Sergio Massa assimilated the blow of a brutal run on the peso that pushed it to the edge several weeks ago, managing to survive but continue to live on the edge.
Massa is resilient, much more so than his predecessors, but even he has a limit, despite counting on the tacit support of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the “lender of last resort” when it comes to the political capital backstopping this slow-motion train wreck of a government. As a fearful population watched news on TV and online showing the black market “dólar blue” flirt with 500 pesos per greenback, the economy minister and the rest of the political class was trying to figure out how to stop the meteoric rise of libertarian economist Javier Miliei, whose political platform is based on the incineration of the Central Bank and the forced dollarization of the economy. Hanging on in quiet desperation, as the song goes, Argentines are once again hostages to runaway inflation and the evaporation of their purchasing power ahead of a triple election event that remains too far to even predict in what state we’ll arrive there, not to mention the end of the month. While Milei has slowed down and the peso had found relative calm before tanking once again, the coming elections, the weak macroeconomic circumstance, and ongoing negotiations with the International Monetary Fund mean we’ll be on the knife’s-edge all the way to the end of the year.
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