The raw x-ray of the “curse of the Argentine economy” from the newspaper El País

Who is the main debtor of the International Monetary Fund and who is experiencing one of the contractions the most serious in America for the pandemic. That the currency continues to devalue, that inflation is very high and that four in ten citizens live in poverty.

This is how crude reality is that, according to the newspaper El País de España, lives in Argentina. The text published this Sunday speaks of an economic disaster and declares that the situation in general is very alarming.

The article reviews part of Argentina’s history and how the various stages and decisions that have brought the country to its present day have taken place.

In 1921, it was one of the richest countries in the world, its GDP per capita was equivalent to that of France or Germany at that time. However, it experienced an annual inflation of 105% and changed your currency up to 5 times: peso national currency until 1969, peso ley until 1983, Argentine peso until 1985, austral until 1991 and current peso.

Since 1980 suspended payments of its external debt five times (no country in the world matches this brand) and is currently the main debtor of the International Monetary Fund, with 44,000 million dollars.

The note points out that in 2019, when Alberto Fernández became president, things were already bad, the country had fallen into default and had been in recession for three years. Martín Guzmán, current Minister of the Economy, “had to reorganize the debt with the creditors, while juggling to resolve the negative effects of the pandemic “. The first thing he managed to get out of hand, “he obtained a significant reduction in interest and lengthened the maturity of payments”.

However, and as the pandemic progressed, Argentina had to resolve the drag on the economy without being able to ask anyone for a dollar. The Central Bank issued more than 1.2 trillion pesos with the risk of inflation getting worse, which started to show up last January with you increase by 4%.

But while Fernández blamed the previous government for the current crisis (“in 2018, the peso lost 40% of its value and the huge loan received from the IMF evaporated in desperate budget deficit coverage and operations speculative), the same said Mauricio macri when he came to power, with the legacy of serious problems.

In this way, the Spanish newspaper explains that Argentina “He never got out of his seizure.” Diego Sánchez-Ancochea, professor of political economy for development at the University of Oxford, analyzes: “Spaces of tranquility are created, but structural problems are never resolved. Crises come back because they never left ”.

The trauma of the “corralito” of 2001 has still not been overcome and this has generated a bimonetary country. This shows that the real estate market prices are in dollars.

The article also quotes an interview conducted by Bugle to the economist Martín Rapetti, who estimates that in real terms, the gross product per capita in Argentina is today almost the same as in 1974. With the aggravating factor that the inequality between rich and poor is much older. Almost half a century lost.

Ripetti makes a grim prognosis: counting on the Argentine economy to grow by 6% in 2021 and then continue to grow at an uninterrupted rate of 4.5% per year, something quite improbable, The 2011 standard of living will not recover until 2027.

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