President Javier Milei He gave an extensive interview to the business media Bloomberg, in which he referred to the situation dollarization what he promised during the campaign and made it clear why he has not yet managed to deliver on it. In this sense, he referred to the opposition and concluded: “Surely the politicians would have said that there had been a scam, they would have accused us of some shady deal and they would have sent us to prison.”
The president explained this when asked about his plans to raise the exchange rate and eliminate the Central Bank. “The ultimate goal of eliminating it remains in place. It is a moral discussion. And for me stealing is wrong. And what the Central Bank does when it prints money is a counterfeit and a scam. Therefore, from this point of view, this long-term goal persists. Now that’s the question of the technical discussion about what that entails,” she said.
In this regard, he once again emphasized that he had received a “completely failed” Central Bank., with negative net international reserves and the equivalent of three monetary bases in remunerated liabilities. For this reason, he said, it is necessary to “clean it up”. “Argentina faced a twin deficit of 17 points of GDP, of which 15 corresponded to the fiscal deficit,” she explained.
“We had a dollarization strategy which was basically taking the Central Bank’s assets against the national government and moving those securities into the market.. And then we earn money by selling those securities”, explained the head of state.
“And the reality is that this strategy would have worked perfectly, because when we arrived, Argentine bonds were around $18 and now they are around $54. So… it would have been a very successful management and we could have done it,” he said. observed.
Milei, on the steps of Congress during his inauguration. (Xinhua/Javier Gonzalez Toledo)“But given the structure of the Argentine political system, and given the intellectual dishonesty of politicians and economists in Argentina, it is very likely that if we had carried out that operation, which would have been a market-rate operation, “Surely the politicians would have said that there was a scam” the president surmised.
For Milei, if he had implemented that strategy he would have been accused of having committed a crime. “Surely they would have accused us of some shady business and They would have sent us to prison. So it’s not that it wasn’t feasible to do it in technical terms. But we deduced that in political terms politics would play dirty and in fact that is what they do,” she said.
In this context he targeted the opposition. “In their intellectual dishonesty, let’s say, (the opposition) would have started some kind of political process and today the story would be different. So we were faced with that scenario “We have undertaken a fiscal adjustment unprecedented in the history of mankind.”, Milei said. The economist claims to have managed to adjust 12 points of GDP in three months. “This has no historical documentation,” she noted.
In the same interview, Milei said he has people’s support for the adjustment he is making. “If there was a runoff today, we would win 58-42, that is, today we would win by 16 points. Even though we have achieved the largest fiscal and monetary adjustment in the history of humanity, today we would even be able to win in the first round with 53% . Why should I change?”hill
Source: Clarin
