Javier Milei, another case of an economist aspiring to be a candidate for President. Picture MARCELO CARROLL
“I’m interested in investing in the Argentine economy. What opportunities do you recommend?
Any portfolio manager of a pension fund in Wisconsin could ask Máxima Zorreguieta, an economist at HSBC in New York, this question in the late 1990s.
Argentina was also a light-eyed blonde at the time. Immediately after this request, HSBC’s sales agent and former James Capel will receive a report from the Buenos Aires hub with investment opportunities in the Argentine economy (sectors, companies, etc.) and the views of key macroeconomic variables to be displayed in the portfolio manager and close the deal. One of the analysts the bank has is Javier Milei.
Máxima became queen of the Netherlands. Milei, a leading actor in Argentine politics. Both worked at HSBC, albeit on different teams and locations. On several trips to the Buenos Aires hub, Máxima stopped at the city offices. After all, what Zorreguieta sells and sells on Wall Street can be seen in the paper (research) where economists like Milei put numbers and calculations of rationale for investors ’decisions.
Milei has studied Economics at the University of Belgrade. It was received. He also passed the Social Economic and Development Institute, a think tank where he graduated with a postgraduate degree in Economics.
The history of IDES says that in the 1970s it ‘received’ heterodox-Keynesian economists who stopped teaching at UBA because of the dictatorship; in the 1980s, it regained its luster thanks to the return of democracy; and in the 1990s there was a large part of Raúl Alfonsín’s economic group led by Juan Sourrouille. Juan Carlos Torre, sociologist and author of the book Temporada en el Quinto Piso, in which he recounts some details of that management, is the director of IDES Economic Development Magazine. And Cedes, where economists like Roberto Frenkel were there, funded their activities. It can be said that if IDES was the think tank of heterodoxy in those years, CEMA was the orthodoxy.
In classrooms on the street of Aráozremember some of his former teachers, he knows how to be a star student. And he even became an assistant in the Microeconomics course led by two well -known economists from the world of finance: Javier Finkman and Fabián Abadie.
Finkman and Abadie were working at HSBC at the time. And they offered Milei to work with them at the bank. I agree. He later even finished giving Finance classes to the master’s degree at UBA with the two of them. He taught financial theory, general equilibrium, and business valuation.
In the early 1990s, Finkman and Abadie began valuing firms for the Capel firm, an international brokerage house that partnered with Roberts Bank of which HSBC owns a stake. Zorreguieta is also in the Chapel. Capel was sucked by the bank.
The job of that team at HSBC is to check stocks and evaluate companies. At the beginning of the convertibility, the volume of the capital market increased. And with it, the interest in Argentina.
Milei remembered that work as she studied it “Financial markets are adjusting fast and commodity markets are slow”. Add that “That was key when the subprime crisis came in 2008. I was a great portfolio manager during the instability”.
And now? How would you rate Argentina? Would you say it falls below or has more downside risk?
“Argentina is now a case of so -called financial distress. If the bartolero defaults and there is a sharp drop in demand for money leading to hyperinflation … no doubt, the first effect is that everything will collapse. “
What is left of this ‘Economics of Nonfiction’ story from almost 25 years ago? Small and nothing.
Zorreguieta left his position and was replaced by Gabriel Martino, who will be CEO in Argentina. From working at HSBC Milei went to Máxima AFJP. Abadie left the bank before the crisis in 2001. Finkman, on the other hand, remained in the research area. He died in 2019.
“In Argentina of the 90s, the financial market, although it was emerging, was improving compared to the current decline”Abadie remembered. “Bonds are traded 24 hours a day and for that the books passed from Argentina to Japan, then to England and back to Argentina. The philosophy of investment banks is to provide liquidity to the markets and earn money with this restriction.
Then Milei goes to Broda Studio. And eventually he will take a route ‘known’ to the market (Argentina Airports 2000, etc.). He even advised Argentine companies that have sued ICSID for the Attorney General’s Office. Meanwhile, postgraduate offers have risen. Not just IDES or CEMA. He then completed a postgraduate degree at Di Tella.
Completing this tour the figure of Milei exploded. Many wonder if it is a bubbles product marketing or starting a new configuration in political and electoral offerings. The market will have the word.
Source: Clarin
