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Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy. It turns out it doesn't take much to

Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy. It turns out it doesn't take much to appear to be an economic genius - just stop spending money the government doesn't have and get rid of onerous market regulations (eg. rent controls). I'm in support of social spending to support those in need, but it's clear Argentina was moving ever-further away from being able to sustain that kind of discretionary spending as a country. They need to get their house in order first.

karparov 2y ago
> stop spending money the government doesn't have That shows quite the misconception about what "money" actually is.
- ttoinou 2y ago
  Not everyone believes in Modern Monetary Theory
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    Not everyone believes the earth isn't flat either unfortunately. There's no need to adhere to a particular economic theory (I'm not particularly familiar with MMT) to realize that, at societies scale, money isn't some kind of scarce commodity.
    - ttoinou 2y ago
      The government spending more money makes money less scarce [0], at any scale (macro, micro etc). That's what we're talking about here. [0] Unless you believe in MMT
      - littlestymaar 2y ago
        You're moving the goalpost. Here's the original quote: > stop spending money the government doesn't have Which has nothing to do with your response.
        andriesm 2y ago
        I interpret "government should stop spending money they don't have" metaphorically as standing in for "don't spend so much money (especially in economically unproductive ways) that it devalues money and misallocates resources so much that it slows down economic growth". I think simplistic statements "government should not spend money it doesn't have" or "government should stop spending so much money" are all just the normal average person's way of trying to phrase this fundamental economic truth that anyone with a working brain can intuit. It's obvious that governments cannot just spend any arbitrary large amount of money without consequence. It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much easier to overspend than to underspend. So constant calls for governments to go on monetary diets and "make better food choices" are clearly warranted.
        littlestymaar 2y ago
        > I think simplistic statements "government should not spend money it doesn't have" or "government should stop spending so much money" are all just the normal average person's way of trying to phrase this fundamental economic truth that anyone with a working brain can intuit. There Is Always a Well-Known Solution to Every Human Problem—Neat, Plausible, and Wrong > It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much eadier to overspend than to underspend. You accidentally came up with the best possible illustration for the topic, and it's a really good illustration that actually goes against your argument: - If you eat too much, you'll get fat and unhealthy. - If you eat too little, you'll die from starvation. And you're right, it's exactly the same for government spending: if the government spends too much, it's not good, but if it's spends too little the economy's dead.
        karparov 2y ago
        Wouldn't an economic indicator for the "right level" be nice? Maintained by some economic research institute (without some obvious agenda)? Or does that already exist, I just don't know it? Maybe it's not just one-dimensional though, i.e., it could matter where exactly spending occurs.
- concordDance 2y ago
  Isn't this kind of statement metaphorical? The literal thing that happens is your country starts spending a greater and greater proportion of revenue servicing its debt (and eventually defaults), but this is less snappy to say.
  - simiones 2y ago
    That depends to a great extent on how the money is actually spent. The USA spent huge amounts of money to get out of the Great Depression, much, much more than it was spending before, and it ended up in a much better economic position, despite a gigantic war soon after.
    - AlexandrB 2y ago
      I thought the reason the US ended up with a good economy was because of the war, not despite of it[1]. The war massively ramped up the US's industrial output, and unlike many of the other allied powers there was no need to rebuild once the war ended. [1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-world-war-ii/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...
      - simiones 2y ago
        A war doesn't directly improve the economy. It's spending on industry that was justified by the war (plus national fervor) that helped with this. But building ships and planes and tanks is not fundamentally useful for civilian industry. If the same level of investment had been directed to civilian industries instead of military, the economy would probably have been even higher. I do agree that the relative value of the US economy shot up directly due to the destruction the war brought to European, Chinese, Japanese, and USSR industry and populations - so if you were discussing things in this sense, I can agree.
        mrbungie 2y ago
        I really doubt the technology would've advanced as fast without such an adversarial setting. Economic warfare is child's play vs total war. All that knowledge and redirected output ended up being extremely profitable once it could be used for civilians instead of the military when the war ended.
- Panzer04 2y ago
  Sure, but Argentina wasn't doing ING what an MMT theorist would advocate for (which is balancing government spending with available productive capacity). This is evident because they had an out of control inflation rate.
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    Argentina's economy has been a shit show for a while. And of course outright killing the economy and everybody's standard of living in the process means you're doing something, but it's not what I'd consider helping the economy.
    - Panzer04 2y ago
      Of course, the first order effect of less spending is not usually good, particulary for those receiving the money. However, Argentina has runaway second order effects like inflation that must be dealt with, and we know that the only real way to deal with that is to depress the money supply. They will have to deal with the pain in order to repair the rest of the economy; it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long.
      - littlestymaar 2y ago
        > it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long. There's no rational beyond blind faith here. Inflation will eventually stop, most likely, but thinking that “because of the sacrifice, things will go better in the end” is just magical thinking. The economy doesn't give a shit about morality, and Germans are paying the price of this belief at this very moment: they put their moral take about debt (“Schuld”, which also means “guilt”) in their Constitution in 2009 and now they are stuck in a recession with no end in sight because the government cannot support their economy, and they also bullied the whole Europe into reducing their debt during the 2010s, which lead to catatonic growth level in the EU for a decade. When economics policies are decided on a moral basis with religious-inspired arguments it leads to disaster (and it's true no matter what moral values are driving it: Mao starved his population for the exact same reason, even though the moral values that inspired his policies weren't the same).
- ekkiren 2y ago
  [flagged]
Daishiman 2y ago
> Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy. Installed industrial capacity at its lowest, real cost in USD through the roof, large corporations that have been around for _decades_ shutting down because of a lack of demand, the shutdown of government programs for vaccine distribution and HIV immune therapy, the complete and absolute mismanagement around forest fires, and the lowest spending in science in the past 20 years. There is not a single metric in which the country is better off. A couple bankers and mining corporations are doing great. For everyone else, the cost of living is unbearably high and productivity low.
- Panzer04 2y ago
  Real cost in USD going up because they're releasing the artificial peg that most people can't access anyway? No one says it's going to be all sunshine and roses, but fixing inflation and housing/rental prices seems like a pretty solid start, as well as moving towards eliminating a currency peg.
  - simiones 2y ago
    If real cost of living in USD is going up, how are they fixing inflation?
  - Daishiman 2y ago
    Where are you getting that they’re releasing the peg? No market instrument has priced that in and every time it gets raised the Minister of Economy moves the bar for when that will happen. They need a capital injection from the IMF that they will never get because Caputo asked for $45 billion loan for the IMF for the same purpose two presidencies ago and it changed nothing.
- zone411 2y ago
  You meant utilization not capacity. Your other points are similarly confused. Argentinians disagree. "The percentage of Argentines who say their standard of living is getting better (53%) has inched above the majority level for the first time since 2015." https://news.gallup.com/poll/654089/javier-milei-argentina-charts.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/654089/javier-milei-argentina-c... "Argentina's monthly inflation rate dropped to 2.2% in January, its lowest since mid-2020 after libertarian President Javier Milei took office just over a year ago ushering in austerity measures that have helped stabilize the embattled economy." https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-inflation-rate-seen-hitting-milei-era-low-2025-02-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-inflation-r...
KingOfCoders 2y ago
"However, some described Peronism as a Latin American form of fascism instead." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peronism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peronism
- spacechild1 2y ago
  What do you want to say with that?
manoDev 2y ago
Argentina has an economy that is strongly indexed on USD due to hyperinflation of the Peso and parallel exchanges everywhere ("cambio negro"). What Milei is doing: he's giving up on Argentinian Peso and adopting the USD as de-facto currency. This is a political move, giving up national sovereignty in exchange of getting Argentina closer to the USA and away from Latin America. It's no coincidence Trump and Elon Musk are praising the Argentinian president.

karparov 2y ago

> stop spending money the government doesn't have That shows quite the misconception about what "money" actually is.

ttoinou 2y ago
Not everyone believes in Modern Monetary Theory
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  Not everyone believes the earth isn't flat either unfortunately. There's no need to adhere to a particular economic theory (I'm not particularly familiar with MMT) to realize that, at societies scale, money isn't some kind of scarce commodity.
  - ttoinou 2y ago
    The government spending more money makes money less scarce [0], at any scale (macro, micro etc). That's what we're talking about here. [0] Unless you believe in MMT
    - littlestymaar 2y ago
      You're moving the goalpost. Here's the original quote: > stop spending money the government doesn't have Which has nothing to do with your response.
      - andriesm 2y ago
        I interpret "government should stop spending money they don't have" metaphorically as standing in for "don't spend so much money (especially in economically unproductive ways) that it devalues money and misallocates resources so much that it slows down economic growth". I think simplistic statements "government should not spend money it doesn't have" or "government should stop spending so much money" are all just the normal average person's way of trying to phrase this fundamental economic truth that anyone with a working brain can intuit. It's obvious that governments cannot just spend any arbitrary large amount of money without consequence. It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much easier to overspend than to underspend. So constant calls for governments to go on monetary diets and "make better food choices" are clearly warranted.
        littlestymaar 2y ago
        > I think simplistic statements "government should not spend money it doesn't have" or "government should stop spending so much money" are all just the normal average person's way of trying to phrase this fundamental economic truth that anyone with a working brain can intuit. There Is Always a Well-Known Solution to Every Human Problem—Neat, Plausible, and Wrong > It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much eadier to overspend than to underspend. You accidentally came up with the best possible illustration for the topic, and it's a really good illustration that actually goes against your argument: - If you eat too much, you'll get fat and unhealthy. - If you eat too little, you'll die from starvation. And you're right, it's exactly the same for government spending: if the government spends too much, it's not good, but if it's spends too little the economy's dead.
        karparov 2y ago
        Wouldn't an economic indicator for the "right level" be nice? Maintained by some economic research institute (without some obvious agenda)? Or does that already exist, I just don't know it? Maybe it's not just one-dimensional though, i.e., it could matter where exactly spending occurs.
concordDance 2y ago
Isn't this kind of statement metaphorical? The literal thing that happens is your country starts spending a greater and greater proportion of revenue servicing its debt (and eventually defaults), but this is less snappy to say.
- simiones 2y ago
  That depends to a great extent on how the money is actually spent. The USA spent huge amounts of money to get out of the Great Depression, much, much more than it was spending before, and it ended up in a much better economic position, despite a gigantic war soon after.
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    I thought the reason the US ended up with a good economy was because of the war, not despite of it[1]. The war massively ramped up the US's industrial output, and unlike many of the other allied powers there was no need to rebuild once the war ended. [1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-world-war-ii/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...
    - simiones 2y ago
      A war doesn't directly improve the economy. It's spending on industry that was justified by the war (plus national fervor) that helped with this. But building ships and planes and tanks is not fundamentally useful for civilian industry. If the same level of investment had been directed to civilian industries instead of military, the economy would probably have been even higher. I do agree that the relative value of the US economy shot up directly due to the destruction the war brought to European, Chinese, Japanese, and USSR industry and populations - so if you were discussing things in this sense, I can agree.
      - mrbungie 2y ago
        I really doubt the technology would've advanced as fast without such an adversarial setting. Economic warfare is child's play vs total war. All that knowledge and redirected output ended up being extremely profitable once it could be used for civilians instead of the military when the war ended.
Panzer04 2y ago
Sure, but Argentina wasn't doing ING what an MMT theorist would advocate for (which is balancing government spending with available productive capacity). This is evident because they had an out of control inflation rate.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  Argentina's economy has been a shit show for a while. And of course outright killing the economy and everybody's standard of living in the process means you're doing something, but it's not what I'd consider helping the economy.
  - Panzer04 2y ago
    Of course, the first order effect of less spending is not usually good, particulary for those receiving the money. However, Argentina has runaway second order effects like inflation that must be dealt with, and we know that the only real way to deal with that is to depress the money supply. They will have to deal with the pain in order to repair the rest of the economy; it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long.
    - littlestymaar 2y ago
      > it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long. There's no rational beyond blind faith here. Inflation will eventually stop, most likely, but thinking that “because of the sacrifice, things will go better in the end” is just magical thinking. The economy doesn't give a shit about morality, and Germans are paying the price of this belief at this very moment: they put their moral take about debt (“Schuld”, which also means “guilt”) in their Constitution in 2009 and now they are stuck in a recession with no end in sight because the government cannot support their economy, and they also bullied the whole Europe into reducing their debt during the 2010s, which lead to catatonic growth level in the EU for a decade. When economics policies are decided on a moral basis with religious-inspired arguments it leads to disaster (and it's true no matter what moral values are driving it: Mao starved his population for the exact same reason, even though the moral values that inspired his policies weren't the same).
ekkiren 2y ago
[flagged]

Daishiman 2y ago

> Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy. Installed industrial capacity at its lowest, real cost in USD through the roof, large corporations that have been around for _decades_ shutting down because of a lack of demand, the shutdown of government programs for vaccine distribution and HIV immune therapy, the complete and absolute mismanagement around forest fires, and the lowest spending in science in the past 20 years. There is not a single metric in which the country is better off. A couple bankers and mining corporations are doing great. For everyone else, the cost of living is unbearably high and productivity low.

Panzer04 2y ago
Real cost in USD going up because they're releasing the artificial peg that most people can't access anyway? No one says it's going to be all sunshine and roses, but fixing inflation and housing/rental prices seems like a pretty solid start, as well as moving towards eliminating a currency peg.
- simiones 2y ago
  If real cost of living in USD is going up, how are they fixing inflation?
- Daishiman 2y ago
  Where are you getting that they’re releasing the peg? No market instrument has priced that in and every time it gets raised the Minister of Economy moves the bar for when that will happen. They need a capital injection from the IMF that they will never get because Caputo asked for $45 billion loan for the IMF for the same purpose two presidencies ago and it changed nothing.
zone411 2y ago
You meant utilization not capacity. Your other points are similarly confused. Argentinians disagree. "The percentage of Argentines who say their standard of living is getting better (53%) has inched above the majority level for the first time since 2015." https://news.gallup.com/poll/654089/javier-milei-argentina-charts.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/654089/javier-milei-argentina-c... "Argentina's monthly inflation rate dropped to 2.2% in January, its lowest since mid-2020 after libertarian President Javier Milei took office just over a year ago ushering in austerity measures that have helped stabilize the embattled economy." https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-inflation-rate-seen-hitting-milei-era-low-2025-02-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-inflation-r...

KingOfCoders 2y ago

"However, some described Peronism as a Latin American form of fascism instead." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peronism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peronism

spacechild1 2y ago
What do you want to say with that?

manoDev 2y ago

Argentina has an economy that is strongly indexed on USD due to hyperinflation of the Peso and parallel exchanges everywhere ("cambio negro"). What Milei is doing: he's giving up on Argentinian Peso and adopting the USD as de-facto currency. This is a political move, giving up national sovereignty in exchange of getting Argentina closer to the USA and away from Latin America. It's no coincidence Trump and Elon Musk are praising the Argentinian president.