Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Left-leaning Fernandez hails government of people, but central bank currency move shows no quick fix to economic woes.
Fernandez's win unleashed euphoria in parts of Buenos Aires, as supporters cruised the streets honking their car horns, and a wave of people surged towards the neighbourhood of Chacarita, where the official victory party was being held.
Speaking to supporters at his party's headquarters, Fernandez thanked voters for showing a commitment to building a more equal Argentina.
"We're going to be the Argentina that we deserve because it's not true that we're condemned to this Argentina," he said.
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Argentina Rejects Austerity To Elect Alberto Fernandez President
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @02:13PM (5 children)
They borrow money in foreign currency. That's the most brain damaged thing you could ever do.
Any country that sells debt in a currency that it has no political say in, that is a recipe for disaster. Like borrowing money in a currency you don't earn. What could possibly go wrong??
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday October 28 2019, @04:20PM (2 children)
Poorer countries have 2 options when it comes to credit:
1. Borrow money in foreign currency from nasty folks like the IMF, who can and will use those loans to dictate government policy to the detriment of democracy.
2. Don't borrow money, because no major foreign investors will invest in an asset that's denominated in a currency that could go belly-up at any moment.
And you might think "Well, OK, live within your means, and tax your citizens and your own economy to get money to do things". But if you can't borrow money, your only other viable method of growing your economy quickly is to open your country up to foreign corporations. Those foreign corporations don't want to be taxed, and don't want to pay much for wages, so they'll only join your economy if you promise that they won't have to pay taxes and won't have to pay your citizens more than a few nickels (in US currency) an hour. So who are you going to tax? So now these corporations are also dictating public policy to the detriment of democracy.
The upshot of all this is that the government of many poor countries, even democratically elected governments, regularly find themselves oppressing their own citizens to satisfy the whims of US and European business interests.
And if a head of state of one of these countries refuses to play ball with these lousy deals, those corporations will evaluate whether that country has anything worth grabbing, and if so will make some calls to their good friends in Langley, VA to see whether something can be done about that head of state. And that's a major reason why the US has backed overthrows of democratically elected governments all over the world, especially in Latin America and including Argentina, and why the new governments of those countries are typically made up of CIA assets.
Approximately the only countries that have managed to escape the US/EU-controlled version of this trap to any significant degree are Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. And guess which countries the US foreign policy establishment considers mortal enemies? Other countries that have attempted to wriggle free in recent decades include Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, and Zimbabwe, and you can see how well that worked out.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @05:57PM (1 child)
It's a bit more involved than that.
You do point out the differences between private and public capital sources, and that is correct, but governments have plenty more levers at their disposal than just the door handle.
There are also other approaches that are quite feasible in the margins between the two, on the basis of trade even without capitalisations.
However, even without typing a whole screed that nobody's likely to read about tax and trade structures, we can look at the history of some approaches that poke uncomfortable holes in some of your stereotyping. For example, post-WWII the UK was one hell of a lot more socialist than Denmark is today. They actively nationalised a number of industries. They brought trade unionists into policy and industrial management structures. They applied strict capital controls and massively expanded their welfare state. Yes, the UK did this. The heartland of the "anglosphere" and the home of the vaunted financial district of London. They applied taxes that went beyond being punitive, all the way through to confiscatory.
The result? "Miserable Britain", the "Sick Man of Europe". Nationalised industries weren't national champions, but international laughing stocks. Anyone with capital found ways of doing anything, everything elsewhere because being there was very nearly pointless.
Even rich, powerful, connected countries haven't done very well by this.
And before people start wagging their fingers and talking about Scandinavia, bear in mind that Sweden and Denmark didn't subscribe to many of those approaches, and even to the extent that they did, they've been rolling them back over the last couple of decades to signal success. Norway's been able to put off some days of reckoning for a while on the strength of their north sea oil - but that's getting more expensive to extract and running low, so their pot of proverbial gold is not going to support them indefinitely. Their big idea was to keep some capital from that aside (smart and thrifty) and then invest it - but they have a problem that their high taxes and restrictive structures have made them a less attractive venue for entrepreneurialism. So now they're financiers looking for outside investment opportunities - and they're not about to pour that into an Argentina without some guarantees. Such as, denominating it in dollars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday October 28 2019, @10:59PM
1. What exactly does the situation of the UK in 1950 have to do with the situation of Argentina and other poorer countries in 2019?
2. Your claims about nationalized industries all being horrid doesn't make much sense in the light of Britain's NHS consistently providing better health care than the US's private health system.
3. Regardless of any of that, one problem the UK has not had to face is political instability due to foreign powers attempting to impose their will on the country via covert actions and coups. Pretty much all countries in Latin America and Africa, and many in the Middle East, have.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by BK on Monday October 28 2019, @04:29PM (1 child)
This deserves more discussion.
On one hand, borrowing in a currency you can't reasonably hope to repay is foolish. OTOH, undoubtedly the Argentinians undoubtedly want to participate in causing climate change... which in turn may require those currencies. Its hard to not be able to do what you want.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday October 29 2019, @04:17AM
Make Argentina Great Again! I know where you can get hats with that (MAGA) on it.
(Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Monday October 28 2019, @02:36PM (9 children)
Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by EvilSS on Monday October 28 2019, @02:41PM
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @02:49PM
People keep telling me this, over and over, yet it never changes anything. Perhaps I'M not the one who is insane after all?
Wibble.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday October 28 2019, @02:55PM (3 children)
Yeah, the US will coup this government too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @05:45PM (2 children)
People die when having no food and/or no medicine, you know. And their deaths are nastier than simply being shot.
While a post-coup government can be an equally stupid failure and/or engage in mass slaughter, history shows those options firmly correlate with socialist ideology. No one that I know of, ever destroyed his country in the name of free market.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday October 28 2019, @06:12PM
Wellll that's as much of a lie as I've ever heard.
At bare undeniable minimum, 45,000 people die a year from lack of medical care in the richest country in the world, due to our stupid obsession with the free market. [aphapublications.org](and this particular paper intentionally controls for the fact that poverty kills people in ways not associated with health care)
The GDP of Russia crashed to 50% and the death rate rose rapidly for a over decade [macrotrends.net] after the collapse of Soviet Communism, leaving behind an oligarchical state that is as tyranical and dismal as anything under kruschev.
While the "Chilean Miracle" of mass-murder induced "free market" ideology absolutely corresponded with an increase in GDP(and thus GDP per capita) poverty rates and a reversal of the trend in decreasing death rates [macrotrends.net] too huge increases are stark.
Becoming capitalist absolutely destroys countries as much as any economic transition does. And it doesn't have much to offer in return.
We're murdering people to overthrow a democratically elected government, then killing millions more with ideology. No one benefits from a definition of "freedom" that builds itself
I'm not a communist, but the shit they say makes so much more goddamn sense than this kind of absolutist free market purestrain bullshit, and you sign off on mass murder so easily, based on statements that are trivially found to be wrong.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday October 28 2019, @10:00PM
When the CIA overthrow this government, it will not be because of free markets.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Zinho on Monday October 28 2019, @03:43PM (2 children)
Except that wasn't Einstein, [psychologytoday.com] it was likely to have been one of the founders of Narcotics Anonymous, [amonymifoundation.org] in ~1981.
And even if it were, I'm not comfortable using a definition of insanity proposed by a physicist (as opposed to, say, a psychologist or psychiatrist).
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @04:23PM (1 child)
I'm far more comfortable with physicists than psychologists.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Monday October 28 2019, @07:23PM
That depends. If they are tasked with killing me through a nuclear detonation, I feel far more comfortable if they are psychologists. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @03:01PM
The share price of Argentinian companies fell 63% on Wall St back in August when "Left-leaning Fernandez" won the primary.
(Score: 2) by ewk on Monday October 28 2019, @03:31PM
more equal like everybody is going to be piss-poor and not just the 80-something percent of the population?
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 2, Insightful) by idiot_king on Monday October 28 2019, @03:46PM (3 children)
Glad to see my fellow people in Argentina put a counterpoint to that fascist Bolsonaro. Hopefully this continues the left-leaning wave as a counterbalance to the far-right-wing extremism that has been unfortunately popping up in various parts of the Americas and Europe (although continental Europe has been better at keeping a lid on the racists than "Anglosphere"). Hopefully we can begin to squash this right-wing morons and squeeze them out of the system entirely. But Rome wasn't built in a day, of course, so it will take time. Good job, Argentina!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @03:50PM (1 child)
Yes! And finally the US is turning on Trump and seeing the fascist GOP for what they are. The world is waking up and realizing the fascists are drooling over them. With any luck we will stop ourselves from turning the entire planet into a shit hole.
(Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Monday October 28 2019, @05:02PM
Indeed. Trump is a Peronist, although he will not say so out loud.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday October 28 2019, @06:18PM
It helps put Bolsanaro into perspective to understand that the center-right party whose voters switched to his extremist party were secretly conspiring [theintercept.com] with a judge and prosecutor to jail his most credible opponent under (mostly) false pretenses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @09:27PM (1 child)
If you are constantly drunk, it will eventually kill you. You really need to stop.
If you stop suddenly, you will get seizures and then die. Don't do it that way.
It's the same with government spending. Most nations need to cut back, but sudden change is disruptive.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday October 28 2019, @10:03PM
No they don't. They need to spend money in the right places. Tax breaks for political friends for instance, are a bad thing.