1,000
3.00Inflation in Milei's government is on its way to reach more than 300% per year.
It may be useful to take as a reference the Macri government, which was also an extreme right-wing neoliberal government that implemented large austerity measures. It even had many officials in common with Milei's government, including the current economy minister Caputo, who was president of the central bank in Macri's government.
Under Macri's government, inflation went from 31.4% per year in 2016 to 53.8% when he left office in 2019.
@DarrenSpencer Since taking office, Milei has been trying to reduce inflation by cooling down the economy through heavy austerity measures and creating a currency anchor by keeping the dollar low, using central bank reserves to artificially hold the exchange rate. Inflation dropped during the first year, as Milei’s massive devaluation and the resulting recession caused imports to shrink and led to a positive balance in the Current Account (balance between international exports and imports). On top of that, incentives were set up for a carry trade that gives absurd dollar profits to major economic players, who sell dollars to earn astronomical interest in peso denominated instruments. In other words, people had no money to spend and the central bank had dollars to keep the exchange rate low, so prices couldn’t rise and inflation was reducing. But all economists agree this plan (that was tried several times, for example during the last Dictatorship in the 70s and 80s, with Menem in the 90s and with Macri some years ago) is unsustainable and creates a lot of harm. It can only work as long as the central bank has dollar reserves. It worked during the first year because the government pulled several “white rabbits” out of the hat (as economists nicknamed these measures lol), like temporarily lowering export taxes to boost exports, or a highly successful capital amnesty that allowed Argentinians with undeclared dollars abroad to bring them into the country without paying any taxes at all (benefiting tax evaders and reinforcing a dangerous precedent that any government in need of dollars will resort to another amnesty.)
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But, as was expected, in the last three months, the market has lost faith in Milei and Caputo’s plan, seeing that central bank reserves have been nearly exhausted. The dollars from the capital amnesty runned out and the carry trade is reversing, with everyone starting to dump pesos to withdraw their gains in dollars. That’s why the government is now desperately trying to secure another deal with the IMF, trying to get another 20.000.000.000 dollars in debt. This is more or less what happened under Macri, btw. In the coming days, we’ll see the consequences of the new deal and find out the new exchange rate policies (as a condition for the loan, the IMF wants the peso to be devalued.) So, inflation is very likely to spike severely in the next few months, Milei may lose the midterm elections in October (he is covered by scandals like Libra, and reducing inflation was the only thing that was holding his approval ratings), and the economy could spiral out of control over the next two years. Once again, all it takes is to look at what happened between 2015 and 2019 with Macri.
@SGQ I'm currently assuming it's something like "at any point, as measured YoY". But I would very much like clarification!