Peso by Peso

Budget surpluses, fiscal responsibility and other rare sightings...

(Sunrise in Argentina. Image: Substack)

“Not only is the capitalist system a more efficient one, it is also a just one. It is the only system that brings prosperity to the world.”

~ Javier Milei, March 2026

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Daytona Beach, Florida...

First up, an item you don’t usually find reported in the popular press. From Investing.com:

Argentina recorded a fiscal surplus of 1.41 trillion pesos (US$1.01 billion) in February, Economy Minister Luis Caputo announced on X on Monday.

The February surplus follows a similar positive fiscal result in January, marking two consecutive months of surplus for the Latin American nation [this year].

Readers will recall that balanced budgets are a “no negotiation” platform of Javier Milei’s economic policy. The first year of his presidency, 2024, marked the country’s first annual balanced surplus in 14 years. 2025 was the second consecutive year.

Meanwhile, per Sr. Caputo’s original post:

Total primary spending fell 8.8% y.o.y. in real terms, while resources allocated to contributory pensions and the Universal Child Allowance grew 1.8% and 11.3%, respectively.

Likewise, the laws on the Presumption of Fiscal Innocence and Labor Reform will contribute to the formalization of the economy, which, together with economic growth and strict control of public spending, will enable the continued reduction of taxes.

It is worth recalling that between 2024 and 2025, the cumulative tax reduction amounted to 2.5% of GDP.

Back in Black

In related – and equally unusual – news, the IMF has projected that Argentina will be the sole country in the entire Americas running a fiscal surplus in 2026.

Read that one again. The only country to run a surplus this year. Not Canada... not Mexico or Brazil or Colombia... and certainly not Los Estados Unidos (according to the Congressional Budget Office, the US is projected to run a ~$1.9 trillion deficit for the fiscal year, equivalent to roughly 5.8% of GDP)...

...but perennial economic basket case, Argentina.

How many economists had that on their bingo card for 2026? Surely none of the 100+ “public intellectuals” who penned an open letter ahead of Javier Milei’s election back in 2023, when they were busily mongering their doomsday predictions and chicken little prognostications.

You remember the grave warnings, dear reader, in which Thomas Piketty et al characterized Milei’s laissez-faire economics as “fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people.”

The open letter’s authors predicted that “a major reduction in government spending would increase already high levels of poverty and inequality, and could result in significantly increased social tensions and conflict.”

“Javier Milei’s [...] fiscal austerity proposals overlook the complexities of modern economies, ignore lessons from historical crises, and open the door for accentuating already severe inequalities,” they whined, tossing their toysies out of their collectivist crib.

The Pretense of Knowledge

Ah yes, the “complexities of modern economies,” over which the griping elites alone claim special and exclusive knowledge—a pretense against which Hayek warned us to remain on guard.

And yet, poverty is down (waaay down, in fact)... economic growth is up (waaay up, in fact)... and the president enjoys a higher approval rating today than when he came to office, even after his reckless “libertarian” policies dared cut inflation by 90%, from ~300% annually to ~30%.

It’s almost as though the libertarian’s whacky free market experiment is working, as though people prefer free trade to state coercion, private investments to public catastrophe, their own money to the promises of thieving politicians.

Here’s Milei himself, in a heated exchange with Argentine lawmakers in congreso:

“You can’t applaud because your hands stray into other people’s pockets.”

Mercifully, your humble editor is not weighed down by the academic gravity of a Thomas Piketty or a Joseph Stiglitz or a Jayati Ghosh, thus we are uneducated enough to know that budget surpluses, “strict control of public spending,” and less government meddling in the market are preferable to deficit spending, fiscal insanity and gangs of elitist world improvers claiming to know better than private individuals what’s in their own interest.

And while bloviating academics and blowhard journalists go out of their way to ignore the real story here – whether through willful ignorance or something more sinister, we leave it to the reader to decide – investors are awakening to the myriad opportunities down on the Pampas.

Paso a Paso

Less than 24 hours after Caputo’s post, above, he was obliged to take to X again to announce that, following a series of meetings in New York City last week, ride sharing giant Uber pledged to invest another $500 million in Argentina... topping off a week in which $16+ billion worth of investments were announced in a country that, until Milei came to power a couple of years ago, had not two pesos to rub together.

As the president remarked at the Madrid Economic Forum earlier this month:

“I’m not here to throw slogans. Everything I say today, I’m backing it up with facts achieved by Argentina, which we are making great again!”

Paso a paso... peso a peso... the greatest political experiment of our age continues apace.

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

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. As always, we are grateful to all Notes members for their generous support. Here’s what a few happy readers have to say about their membership…

If you have not already done so, please feel free to join this burgeoning community and support our work right here. You’ll feel good for having done good. Promise.