


Much of the mainstream press and denizens of establishment academia are gathering forces to present the claim that President Javier Milei will somehow crash the economy.
They hate him and they tried to stop his election, trying to paint him as a crazy man.
Now that they have failed, the next best thing is to try to stop his plan to fix the Argentinian economy, howling of doom on the horizon.
It's stupid stuff because Argentina's voters know what Milei plans to do -- and they gave him their vote because of it. They know it will work.
Milei's plan is to dollarize the economy, meaning, Argentina can do as successful countries like Panama do, and use the U.S. dollar instead of their constantly devaluing peso.
They can save money now, (watch Tucker Carlson's segment from September on how hellish it is to live like they did with a constantly melting peso and hyperinflation), they can take their dollar-denominated savings out of Uruguayan banks and put them into Argentinian ones, and they can start to live like normal people.
As I wrote here at the time of Tucker's segment:
It's also fearsomely accurate — it describes the Argentina I saw during its post-2001 devaluation period, with people losing their life savings to inflation, people unable to get their money out of banks, people bitterly banging on pots and pans in protest, people desperately trying to get hold of black market dollars just to have currency that is worth something tomorrow, and stuffing those dollars under their mattresses. Tucker's segment told me that absolutely nothing has changed in that country, except that it's getting worse, and the people are ready to rise up to put a stop to the nightmare.
The idea was so powerful it's what Milei won the election on on Sunday. He certainly didn't hide that from the voters -- he was in-your-face about it and because of it, the voters said 'yes' by a more-than-ten-point margin.
But get a load of the doomsaying:
Puts the peso's future in doubt? They say that like it's a bad thing. It's embarrassing.
Now the economic heavyweights have come out who know from experience that dollarization is going to work in Argentina: Economists Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, John Greenwood, the former chief executive of London-based investment powerhouse Invesco, and Francisco Zalles, an economist who was present in Ecuador when Ecuador dollarized its economy in 2000 and never let go of, despite having a few crazy leftist presidents who vowed to get rid of it and ... didn't.
Check out the abstract that they begin their new working paper titled Dollarize Argentina: Abolish the BRCA (Argentinian version of the Federal Reserve) with:
Over many decades the stability and value of the Argentine peso has been repeatedly undermined by successive governments in Buenos Aires who have relied on the monetary powers of the Argentine central bank to fund budget deficits. This has led to persistently rapid broad money growth, high inflation, and a chronically weak currency. To end the abuse of the central bank we propose abolishing the BCRA and dollarizing the economy. In 1999, at the invitation of Pres. Carlos Menem, Steve H. Hanke and Kurt Schuler first proposed that the Argentine economy be dollarized. The first thing to do is to establish a market exchange by ending capital/exchange controls and allowing the currency to float freely for a month before locking into a fixed exchange rate. After Dollarization - Day, all peso - denominated assets, liabilities, and contracts would be replaced with USD at a fixed rate, and outstanding peso banknote issues would be exchanged for USD banknotes over a period of 6 - 9 months. To deal with any shortage of coins, the government would mint new USD - denominated coins with Argentine symbology to replace worthless peso coins, the new coins to be backed 1:1 with US$ paid for by the banks when they order cash for their customers. The important short - term money market in peso - denominated LELIQs would be replaced with US$ - denominated government securities to be issued and redeemed by a new, independent office for Argentine government debt - along the lines of the British DMO. Under this plan, inflation and interest rates could be expected to fall rapidly. There is nothing special about the Argentine case that prevents dollarization, only lack of knowledge of the correct procedures and the political authority to implement them
It's full of detail demonstrating why dollarization will work in Argentina. Time constraints won't permit me to describe all of it but it's quite decisive and shows just how gutsy Milei is to take the bull by the horns and solve Argentina's chronic inflation problems. The public agrees, they have had enough, they are going forward.
Read the whole thing here.
Image: Twitter screen shot