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Agentina at this point has a terminal case of populism, from what I understand. This plus central bank being subservient to the whims of the state, plus simple export-driven economy where diverting labor from agriculture to industry eliminates surpluses, plus human capital flight… Really a proof for why independent CB is valuable. And low time preference is indispensable.
On the other hand, a good use case for crypto.
The largest problem is that the central government doesn’t control spending. This is why the terminal case of money printing exists, Argentina’s constitution is extremely fucked up and resembles a combination of the pre-civil war US, the EU and a modern federal country. Provinces are supreme other than some powers they nominally ‘delegate’ to the federal government. There are like 20 provinces and many are controlled by a single party, cluster of local patricians or just a single family.
Read this extraordinary OECD profile. Argentina is one of the most decentralized countries in the world. Provinces seem to have a constitutional right to borrow up to 25% of their income (most of which comes from their share of federal tax receipts) per year from the federal government. It would be as if US states could unilaterally require the federal reserve to print money for them on an ongoing basis, without Washington being able to do much about it. The federal government collects something like 85% of tax income, but then distributes in practice well over the appropriate share of it to the provinces through this weird arrangement and must pay for all spending at the federal level on the military, infrastructure, etc.
In theory the federal congress can take over provincial government to rein in spending in an emergency, but in practice local power centers are themselves so populist and so entrenched that this is widely seen as impossible, and whenever a federal politician tries to bring the provinces to heel, the provincial elites get scared their powerful patronage networks will go unfunded and so replace the leader with someone more amenable.
If you look at spending patterns every time there’s a remotely non-terrible year in Argentina spending jumps 10-15% in real terms. Like the friend whose money seems to run through his fingers, they can’t not spend everything they have, and more. And of course the provincial system creates perverse incentives where each province has to maximize its bennies before the whole thing goes kaput again.
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