When I first read your notes, I thought you’re crazy. No way the median salary is 5000 a month. Then I went back and reread it… that is crazy low. Argentina Hass to be the nicest poorest country I have ever been to.
On your talking points… All I kept seeing was, strike. They love to strike in Argentina.
Let’s say, hypothetically, someone followed all your talking points. Do you have any faith that the next government wouldn’t fuck it up again?
In my talk with my fellow engineers in Argentina… That’s why they were in favor of dollarization. They have zero faith in their own government. They are aware that dollarization is sub-optimal, but only for a normal country.
One way to square the low salary circle is remember that prices in general are, what, a third of the States? Cars and televisions are more expensive (although AC units are weirdly cheap) but not everything else. $5 haircuts, $500 a month luxury apartments, $10 steak dinners, six-cent commuter train rides.
The World Bank publishes a "purchasing power parity" exchange rate, which is the exchange rate at which things would cost the same in Argentina as in the United States. In 2022, they estimates that rate as 68 pesos per dollar ... when the blue market rate actually averaged 256. If you take that seriously, then that nominal $6,000 a year actually bought as much as $22,000 would get you in the United States.
Which sounds about right, no?
Regarding strikes -- Leticia Abad made the same point. In some respects, the safest medium-term bet is to elect Sergio Massa. He's a Peronist and running on the Fatherland Union ticket, so the unions won't go after him. But he's also from the dissident right-wing party that broke from the main Peronist grouping in '13, so he knows what he has to do. His big recent populist move has been to cut taxes, after all.
But to bring it back to your other point, while Massa might pull off a short-term hat trick of the kind I described, electing him would also ensure that in the longer run Argentina just goes right back to the same cycle of making the same mistakes.
Electing Milei, on the other hand, could be a reasonable long-term bet but bring disaster right now unless he plays his political cards just right, and I'm not sure that the man with the crazy haircut who likes to wave around what looks like an actual chainsaw from a moving car is going to be that good a poker player.
When I first read your notes, I thought you’re crazy. No way the median salary is 5000 a month. Then I went back and reread it… that is crazy low. Argentina Hass to be the nicest poorest country I have ever been to.
On your talking points… All I kept seeing was, strike. They love to strike in Argentina.
Let’s say, hypothetically, someone followed all your talking points. Do you have any faith that the next government wouldn’t fuck it up again?
In my talk with my fellow engineers in Argentina… That’s why they were in favor of dollarization. They have zero faith in their own government. They are aware that dollarization is sub-optimal, but only for a normal country.
Anyway… Love, your Argentinian content.
Thank you, sir!
One way to square the low salary circle is remember that prices in general are, what, a third of the States? Cars and televisions are more expensive (although AC units are weirdly cheap) but not everything else. $5 haircuts, $500 a month luxury apartments, $10 steak dinners, six-cent commuter train rides.
The World Bank publishes a "purchasing power parity" exchange rate, which is the exchange rate at which things would cost the same in Argentina as in the United States. In 2022, they estimates that rate as 68 pesos per dollar ... when the blue market rate actually averaged 256. If you take that seriously, then that nominal $6,000 a year actually bought as much as $22,000 would get you in the United States.
Which sounds about right, no?
Regarding strikes -- Leticia Abad made the same point. In some respects, the safest medium-term bet is to elect Sergio Massa. He's a Peronist and running on the Fatherland Union ticket, so the unions won't go after him. But he's also from the dissident right-wing party that broke from the main Peronist grouping in '13, so he knows what he has to do. His big recent populist move has been to cut taxes, after all.
But to bring it back to your other point, while Massa might pull off a short-term hat trick of the kind I described, electing him would also ensure that in the longer run Argentina just goes right back to the same cycle of making the same mistakes.
Electing Milei, on the other hand, could be a reasonable long-term bet but bring disaster right now unless he plays his political cards just right, and I'm not sure that the man with the crazy haircut who likes to wave around what looks like an actual chainsaw from a moving car is going to be that good a poker player.