En Guardian! (Part II)

Peronista piggies, peso infernos and the real Guardians of poverty...

“A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

~ H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

It’s a blistering 93 degrees out today; only mad dogs and Englishmen venture into the midday heat. Speaking of which...

When we left you on Tuesday, we were “having a go” at The Guardian’s invertebrate editorial board. Barely had we parsed the opening paragraph of their collective “Opinion” piece on Javier Milei’s first year in office and already we’d filled an entire column of our own in response. (See Part I, here.)

Of course, it’s all too easy to laugh and jeer at the nitwits populating the mainstream press. So let us take up where we left off...

We knew we were in for some side-splitting humor when the following zinger caught our eye:

Mr Milei did not so much win the last election as the previous government lost it.

Cute semantics, perhaps, but context here counts...as do the votes. To suggest that Mr. Milei merely squeaked past the post, his victory owing mostly to his opponent’s incompetence, is to make a molehill out of a mountain.

As is now a matter of public record, Javier Milei romped home with the single largest victory margin of any single president in modern Argentine history. Not since the country was delivered from military dictatorship, more than four decades ago, has any one candidate so decisively claimed a mandate from the broad electorate, winning with an unprecedented 11+ point margin.

In fact, Milei won 20 of the nation’s 24 provinces, building a coalition of voters across virtually every age and demographic, including most notably among the working poor. Here’s the breakdown by age/gender, where Milei won all but a single demographic.

[Legend: Blue bars – Sergio Massa; Purple bars – Javier Milei. Nota Bene: In the end, most of those gray “undecideds” fell to Milei, who swept the majority of (female candidate) Patricia Bullrich’s votes and prevailed with ~56% of the overall popular vote. Source: Prosumia]

All this is all old news, of course... except for those still choking down sour grapes over at The Guardian. And here, they were only just getting warmed up!

Peronista Piggies

After conscripting the predictable and, by now, threadbare Milei-Trump false-equivalence, The Guadrian’s brainless trust continued apace:

Mr Milei promised a war on bureaucrats, brutal public spending cuts and sweeping deregulation of South America’s second-largest economy. Predictably, the outcome has been devastating: a recession plunged more than half the country into poverty within the first six months of 2024.

It takes a special kind of mushy-headed credulity to believe that it was Argentina’s poor, embattled political caste that had been unfairly treated over the past 75 years... as opposed to, say, the actual working poor.

If there was a war of aggression here on the Pampas, as many would indeed argue, surely the battles were incited by the powerful Peronist elites themselves, who have after all maintained control through 10 out of 14 presidential cycles since Juan Peron’s shadow first darkened his nation’s doorway back in 1946.

At that time, Argentina was the 7th richest country on the planet in terms of per capita GDP. Three-quarters of a century later, the Peronists have pummeled the country – along with its long suffering people – into the dirt, all the while gorging themselves at the public trough.

By the time Milei “promised war” (read: retaliation) against the fattened bureaucrats and enacted “brutal” (read: necessary) spending cuts, the putrefied Leviathan had grown to account for 45% of the nation’s entire economic output.

The parasites had almost consumed the host, in other words. But leave it to The Guardian’s editorial board to argue that the only thing standing between Buenos Aires and the road to Caracas was... an army of socialist government bureaucrats!

Ah yes, let us spare a salty tear for the Gucci-shod Peronista piggies, who rampaged and pillaged their way through this once-wealthy nation like Vikings through a nunnery. To be so enamored of one’s captors is to present an acute case of political Stockholm Syndrome.

Peso Inferno

As for the “predictably devastating” outcome of Milei’s “brutal” policies, The Guardian appeared all of a sudden to have discovered a level of indignant impatience that was curiously absent during the multi-generational, systematic destruction of a nation.

It also appeared unable to follow basic cause and effect processes, as when it craftily claimed...

When voters went to the polls in October 2023, monthly inflation stood at around 8%, fueling frustration with the established parties and anxiety about the future – sentiments Mr Milei skillfully exploited. After his victory, monthly inflation soared to 25% before dropping back to under 3% in November.

Tracking The Guardian’s incurious line of thinking, one might actually believe inflation just “stood” there... having fallen from the deep blue sky, the fault of no man, woman or gender non-binary lawmaker... existing merely to induce anxiety for the unscrupulous Milei to “exploit,” in presumably the same way a firefighter “exploits” the licking flames as the arsonist absconds unassailed and unquestioned.

To follow further The Guardian’s windswept breadcrumbs, the situation only worsened when Sr. Milei came to power, with inflation really “soaring” after his victory. No mention that the 25% monthly inflation figure was recorded in December 2023... and that Milei didn’t even assume office until mid-way through that month. (He was inaugurated on the 10th and entered office on the 11th.)

Might the nose-bleed figure have anything to do with the fact that, according to official numbers, the outgoing administration expanded the monetary base by printing the equivalent of 28% of the nation’s entire GDP over four years, including the equivalent 13% of GDP which rolled off the presses in the final year alone?

No mention, either, of the fact that it was Sr. Milei’s opponent, Sergio Massa, who, as Minister of Economy during that last year, had his very own fat finger on the “print” button.

It is estimated that during Sr. Massa’s tenure alone, the Argentine monetary base grew from ARS 3.5–4 trillion pesos (in August 2022)... to a staggering ARS 12–15 trillion pesos (in December 2023, the month Milei took office).

For those at home still wrestling with the abacus, that’s a non-trivial ~300% increase... in barely 16 months!

Hmm... might such an epic explosion in the monetary base have had anything to do with hockey-sticking inflation? More than, say, Sr. Milei... who had been in office less than thee weeks when Massa’s fiat Tsunami flooded the economy... and whose own record on clearing the Peronist muck from Augean Stables looks rather like this?

Year over year, Mile has dragged annualized inflation here on the Pampas down from a vertiginous 211% to under 117%, a more than 90-point reduction in twelve short months. And according the average forecast of analysts surveyed by the central bank's market expectations survey, published last week, that rate is forecast to fall to 25% by the end of 2025.

Guardians of Poverty

Needless to say, raging inflation remains a source of daily angst for the Argentine people, especially the poorest, who are most ravaged by it... and certainly there is much work still to be done... but one might think that, as long as The Guardian deigns to mention the metric, they might at least disclose the primary cause of such a wretched blight, even if they cannot quite bring themselves to acknowledge, much less applaud, any and all who fight against it.

As for the lamentable poverty rate, which indeed spiked mid-2023 as Milei’s administration raced to tame teetering hyperinflation and cut the tumefied state down to a manageable level, latest data shows it, too, began falling sharply in the second half of last year… right in line with plummeting inflation.

From local paper, The Buenos Aires Times:

With inflation tumbling from a peak of a monthly 25.5 percent and wages recovering some of the lost ground, the number of poor people had been reduced to as low as 36.8 percent by the end of the second half of last year, according to some private estimates.

[...]

This situation propitiated a fall in the calculations of poverty and destitution for the last six months of last year, descending to 36.8 and 9.2 percent respectively with the number of destitute almost halved.

Work by the CNCPS (Consejo Nacional de Coordinación de Políticas Sociales) in tandem with the Human Capital Ministry estimated poverty as declining to 38.9 percent in the third quarter of 2024. This analysis is based on the INDEC report on income distribution.

The CNCPS prognosis of destitution was 8.6 percent after having registered 20.2 percent in the first quarter and 16 percent in the second. If corroborated, this would be a steeper drop than that calculated by the UTDT’s Nowcast.

Do we hear so much as a soft sigh of joy from The Guardian as inflation plummets, poverty levels decline and Argentina emerges from the malaise of a socialist-induced monetary coma? Or do the hacktivists on its editorial board merely show, once again, that they are no friends of the poor, but rather of poverty itself, and those self-serving political parasites who inflict it?

Perhaps we’ll find out later this year...

Polls indicate Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party is well-positioned to make strong gains in the upcoming legislative elections, scheduled for October. We’ll have more on the dynamic political landscape down here in Argentina’s capital as it all unfolds.

Meanwhile, in a world turned upside down, it’s good to know that some things remain the same. Now, as before, The Guardian remains a joke.

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. Happily for true liberty lovers, freedom is in the ascendency in many places around the world.

It seems like barely a day goes by down here at the End of the World where some nonsensical collectivist weed is not uprooted. And slowly but surely, people are catching on, thanks in large part to independent reporting.

Right here on Substack, for instance, tens of thousands of independent authors, journalists, investigators and opinion columnists are sharing their own perspectives on everything from politics to economics, financial markets to crypto investing, corporatist malfeasance and individual triumphs alike.

We may be small… but we are legion. And we are bringing down the mainstream narrative… one brick at a time.

As always, we are especially grateful to our generous Notes members, whose dues allow us to pursue this humble publication. If you would like to join our growing Notes community and help support the ideas of free markets, free minds and free people, please consider becoming a member today. Thanks in advance ~ JB