UNHERD: You have seen the spectacle. The wild sideburns, the rousing speeches, the roaring chainsaw, the heavy metal music dominating his mass rallies. Javier Milei, the self-styled shackle-breaking, anarcho-capitalist madman, marketed himself as a radical departure from everything that came before. He was going to blow up Argentina’s corrupt political casta, abolish its central bank, adopt the dollar and every kind of crypto coin out there as Argentina’s competing currencies. It was a gutsy bid to replace a century of Peronist and neoliberal failure with the libertarian’s dream: a pure, unadulterated, free market.
Across the globe, the nationalist Right, from Elon Musk, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump to Giorgia Meloni and Britain’s Daily Telegraph, lionised him. Niall Ferguson, the financial oligarchy’s court historian, declared a “man-made miracle” in the making. For a few brief months, as Argentina’s inflation rate plunged from its peaks, and even the poverty rates seemed to decrease, the chorus of fanboys grew deafening. Until everyone fell silent.
Today, the miracle has been exposed as a mirage. Argentina’s economy has nose-dived and its peso is in a death spiral, with a desperate $20-billion lifeline from the US and yet more rescue loans from the IMF keeping the Milei show on the road until the forthcoming mid-term elections. Closer inspection of the poverty reduction sub-miracle also reveals a mirage: the only reason the relative poverty index dropped was that median incomes had fallen faster than those at the bottom with the result that that fewer people now count as poor. The situation in Argentina is what you would call a meltdown — but is it really a surprise? » | Yanis Varoufakis | Thursday, October 16, 2025
