Posted on 02/16/2018 11:05:04 AM PST by nickcarraway
The end of the Peronist hold on Argentine politics and rise of pro-business president Mauricio Macri has heralded in a new age for what was long regarded as one of the most economically unstable nations in Latin America.
The former Buenos Aires mayor and businessman won the presidency in 2015, ousting his mercurial populist Peronist predecessor Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Since coming to power, Macri has worked to restructure a shattered economy ruined by decades of market warping tariffs and subsidies, protectionism, heavy handed regulation, rampant inflation and unsustainable fiscal policies.
The center-right president has been able to achieve what no one thought possible: halving inflation from what independent sources claimed had reached as high as a mind-boggling 40 percent to near a more manageable 20 percent. This helped stimulate economic growth by stabilizing the financial system and allowing the middle-class to borrow again. This, along with Macri dismantling stringent currency exchange and capital controls, has reinvigorated the interest of foreign investors in the Latin American nation.
This helped power the biggest stock market boom in the world, with the Argentine bourse rising by an incredible 77 percent in value during 2017. That trend should continue as Macri focuses on rebuilding Argentina’s energy industry and seeks to capitalize on the nation’s enormous unconventional oil and gas potential.
One of Macri’s most significant achievements was ending the complex system of domestic oil tariffs and subsidies introduced by the Kirchner administration. These distorted local prices, led to considerable underinvestment in the energy industry and saw Argentina become a net energy importer despite its tremendous unconventional oil and gas resources.
The rewards are substantial, considering that Argentina’s technically recoverable shale oil reserves come to 27 billion barrels, which is 60% of the country’s technically recoverable crude. The Vaca Muerta formation is rated by
(Excerpt) Read more at oilprice.com ...
I’ve been to Argentina many times
It has to try hard to be poor and dysfunctional. At times, it succeeds at it. Kirchner was particularly adept at keeping the country down.
The “Trump Effect” seems to be ushering a rebirth, renewal, and golden age opportunities of sorts in countries all over the world.
A few more countries to go...
OPEC is gonna be pizzed
Macri was elected before Trump. He started in 2015.
“Macri was elected before Trump.”
Wow! Then a forshadowing. Like Brexit.
If he’s trying to Make Argentina Great Again(?) I wish him the best of success doing it.
I have a fascination with Argentina and it’s people. I lived in Mexico for 10 years in the 80’s & 90’s. A lot of Argentine’s living in Mexico now because their economy has been in the tank for a very long time.
Seems to me based on second hand information that a lot of people that do go there (Buenos Aires and other big cities) say that the union mentality and doin’ enough just to get by is the way it works. YMMV.
It was unavoidable. Kirchner, who looks like the head madam of a brothel, treated her country as one. She ran it into the ground and the stupidity was clear for everyone except her most corrupt union supporters, to see. For example, to "lower meat prices for the poor," she banned meat exports - one of Argentina's biggest export earners. So farmers slaughtered their herds, and processing plants closed. Thus forcing prices to then quadruple in 6 months, destroying tens of thousands of jobs and a big export industry.
Even the most brain-dead statists became tired of her.
Most Latin American nations have the ability to be just as great as America. It’s the corrupt culture and lazy attitude towards crime that destroys them.
There is hope for improvement in Argentina, Colombia, and Chile.
Sounds like Brazil’s ex-president Dilma Roussef.
Not all female leaders are equal: sadly South Korea’s more than capable female president is sitting in jail over ridiculous trumped-up charges as North Korea-sympathetic crony boys sit pretty.
I know first lady Eva Peron was a leftist but I adore the musical named for her...”Evita.” Had to do a project involving the song “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” in Moscow! And the following day, the orchestral version of the song was booming on the outdoor stereo system downtown on the Arbat. A most spontaneous occurance, yet very fitting.
Russia seems like a very cultured society at its most refined
levels.
Argentina was fairly high-income a century ago, probably top 10 in the world. Even as recently as 1965, it was 25th, at the bottom end of Western Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_projected_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita#World_Bank_estimates_between_1960_and_1969
As of 2016, it was #58, near the mid-range of the ex-Warsaw Pact countries, despite not having endured 40+ years of communist rule.
Yes they were and are very cultured...but as rugged America’s success and freedom attest to, to the dismay of European elites:
Literature and Art and Science has its limits...you abandon God and get Nazis and Bolsheviks.
And from firsthand experience, (I lived in St. Petersburg) - of all Europe: Russia is most likely to fall back into the patterns and habits which led to the disasters, which befell the continent in the 20th Century. And this even with all their newfound external religioisity following the collapse of communism...
They already have been reliving their past, but are reined in by the West and other modern realities. Putin can only be Stalin-lite.
More money for the Socialists to p*ss away.
Thanks nickcarraway.
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