José Luis Espert in Washington: "Argentina will need more money from the Monetary Fund"

Sometimes it seems that for José Luis Espert The greatest political and economic risk on the electoral horizon in Argentina is that Mauricio Macri to be re-elected president. "The balance is not good until now", he said in dialogue with Infobae and other Argentine media in the US capital. "There is less economic activity, more inflation and more poverty," he said.

But after clarifies that Macri, although "part of the problem and not the solution", is actually "the least harm". And that Argentina, to "end the cycle of decadence" in which it has been trapped for decades, its discursive issue,must come back in all that was done during the kirchnerista decade"

Espert strikes to the right and to the left almost without distinction. Although in the case of this liberal economist, who proposes more adjustment of the economy and strong cuts in the state, a radical reform of the workforce to reduce costs and full commercial openness, there is not much right, at least in economic terms. "It takes a radical change to turn around the economy," he warned.

But Espert is also a candidate for the campaign, for the Libertarian Party, and this diagnosis of repeated failure and current emergencies is the central message that has been transmitted to the United States, a necessary scale in its political construction for October. His model, he says, is Chilean Sebastián Piñera more than Jair Bolsonaro o Donald Trump. At the other end is Nicolás Maduro, who proposed "to extract" by force if the diplomatic pressure did not work.

In New York, he spoke with investors and met with Wall Street strategists. Yesterday, in the US capital, he met the head of the IMF mission in Argentina, Roberto Cardarelliand his team, before giving lectures today at the Wilson Center and the Cato Institute, and being received at the State Department. In front of all his interlocutors, he explained his libertarian program and insisted on the necessary reforms to "break the mechanism of perfect decadence that exists in the country".

On the agreement with the IMF, he stressed that it's "a real irresponsibility" to demand renegotiation of the programas demand a good deal of opposition, He believes indeed that Argentina "will need more money from the Fund", because by 2020, a single disbursement, of about 8,000 million dollars, will not be enough to cover the needs . The amount in which the loan should be extended, he said, will depend on whether or not the country regains access to the international capital market.

He did not discuss it with Cardarelli at the Fund's offices. The situation was hardly part of the discussions with IMF technicians, he said. He explained his proposal and talked about the sequence of reforms he promotes. But he shared an optimism he expressed with reservations. "We agree that the economy touches a floor"he summarized. "But I'm not sure it's a floor or a break in the fall," he added.

Inflation, he said during a dialogue Infobae, is one of the most worrying fronts of the economy. "If this continues, it can become a political problem and social and market stress," warned Espert. But he ruled out a new exchange. "There will be no new explosion of exchange," he predicted. But more tension.

"Argentina can no longer be wrong with the opening of the trade"he said in another section of the dialogue: the experiences of Alfredo Martínez de Hoz in the 70s and Domingo Cavallo in the 1990s, they found themselves in an explosion, he explained, because "the exchange rate has been delayed and there is a budget deficit financed by a debt". Before a new tariff reform, he said: "You must have a zero deficit or a robust surplus and reduce labor costs."The economic opening is at the heart of his proposal.

In the regional chapter, he spoke without nuance of the situation in Venezuela and proposed the radical exit of the extraction "like Noriega of Panama". Maduro, said Espert, "is a murderer who uses violence to maintain power, runs a narco state and promotes terrorism". Once "extracted", he must be tried for his crimes.

"We must end this, and for that we must work with the countries of the region, within the framework of the OAS and the United Nations," said Espert. "We need a peacekeeping force that surrounds Venezuela and if necessary, we have to extract it," he insisted categorically.