Presumed Extinct

A rare creature spotted stalking the Argentine Pampas...

(No, it’s not the dodo…)

“I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.”

~ Jorge Luis Borges, Brodie's Report (1970)

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World: Hanoi, Vietnam...

Don’t look now, dear reader, but there’s a rare creature on the prowl down on the Argentine Pampas. So uncommon is this beast, so extraordinary in nature, our amigos at the End of the World had all but presumed it extinct. 

More on this most unusual sighting in a second. But first, a quick update from the road..

Blissful Ignorance

We’re now comfortably into the back half of our annual summer tour, with a week left here in Southeast Asia before our peripatetic Party of Three makes its way back across the deep, blue Pacific... to America... and the great open road. (Wife and Daughter are traveling smoothly; thanks to those dear readers who inquired!)

From one End of the World to another, it’s been an eye-opening (sometimes eye-watering) experience. So far, we’ve journeyed from our home in Argentina, via Chile, to our native Australia... then to Indonesia... on to Malaysia... over to Thailand... up through Laos and, as of last weekend, across to Vietnam. 

The nation’s capital, Hanoi, is as delightfully chaotic as we remember it. The French architecture and cuisine, fused with local flavors and design… old men seated on plastic stools along the sidewalk, fixing disassembled mopeds with one hand, slurping down steaming bowls of pho with the other, and juggling a cigarette between the two… the cacophony of women, young and old, sisters and mothers, selling everything and anything you can imagine, and plenty you probably cannot.

As readers will expect, we don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of the Vietnamese economy, with its myriad intricacies and bewildering complexities. (Merely making it across the street in one piece we consider to be a small miracle.) But then, part of the appeal of being a stranger in a strange land is that one is regularly invited to surrender any pretense of local knowledge. 

Daily do we taste food we cannot describe, hear a babble of accents we cannot decipher, gaze upon a culture we will never comprehend. And so we amble, wide-eyed and bathed in humidity, up and down the frenetic streets and alleyways of Hanoi, marveling at the wonder and energy of life around us. 

Such blissful ignorance is truly liberating in this day and age, when we’re each expected to be climatologists on Monday and epidemiologists on Tuesday, constitutional lawyers on Wednesday and FX arbitrage gurus on Thursday, geopolitical strategists on Friday, Middle Eastern historians on Saturday and theologians on Sunday.

Being severely out of our depths helps us recall the good old days, before “silence was violence” (because…rhyming?), when a healthy skepticism was considered the cornerstone of an open mind and when only “fools rushed in.” It gives us… pause.

Real Profits over False Prophets

Vietnam itself is home to ~100 million souls, each with their own individual hopes and dreams, private hang-ups and irrational fears, broken hearts and moments of quiet triumph. ~100 million souls, careening along the great highway of life…and all crammed into a country roughly the size of New Mexico (pop. 2.1 million).

On the surface, it looks very much like a bustling, market-based economy... pretending to be a centrally-planned, socialist sh!thole.

We see competing vendors, hustling side-by-side, hawking flimsy wares bearing all the communist iconography so familiar to, and beloved by, middle class college students across the west. This they do, presumably, for real profits… and not in the name of false prophets (Lenin, Mao, Ché and the other freshly commercialized t-shirt faces).

Of course, all this is a far cry from what we’re used to seeing in many so-called “developed” countries, which pretend to be bastions of free-market capitalism, but are really some rancid mix of crony-capitalist/corporatist structures, in which regulatory capture, insider trading, government corruption, phony fiat money and all the usual suspects conspire to undermine the existence of the average worker bee.  

North to south, east to west, top to bottom... the world is through the looking glass, Alice. Curious and curiouser, indeed!

Meanwhile, back at the other End of the World...

Sighted over the past week, to the wide-eyed astonishment of Argentines, who never thought they’d live to see the day, a rare and wild creature indeed...

Deflation!

Yes dear reader, after decades of uninterrupted inflation, stagflation and even hyperinflation... of seemingly limitless monetary expansion and consequent rising prices... of watching their pitiful pesos wither on the vine, of what Joyce might have called the “ineluctable modality of the financial”...

...some preliminary, tentative, precious signs of hope...

Here’s the latest chart, which shows weekly inflation for a basket of goods at supermarkets in the Greater Buenos Aires (metro) area: disinflating... disinflating... then deflating. 

Core Reading

Our sources on the ground (friends living in the capital who eat steak, drink wine, ride in cabs, pay bills, etc.) confirm the findings. Meanwhile, our own healthcare coverage for June (family plan for three) came in a whopping ~27% lower than in May. 

Indeed, prices across the board are beginning to settle as president Javier Milei’s structural and economic reforms begin to take effect. Early data on core inflation for June show the rate falling to 2.6% month-over-month in the capital, down from 4.2% the previous month (and waaay down from the 25+% dumpster fire Milei was left when he assumed office, back in December). 

(Source: C&T)

Moreover, price inflation in food and beverages (which, last we checked, was fairly important to people clinging to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder) slowed to 1.5% for the month, the lowest level since right before the pandemic, in early 2020.

Regarding his own reforms, including the massive Ley de Bases (which was granted final approval from the Lower House last week... and about which we’ll have a full breakdown in due course), Javier Milei is unequivocal in his commitment:

“In six months we have done more for Argentina than was done in the last 100 years,” he told national television, Todo Noticias, over the weekend. "We are not going to stop until Argentina is the freest country in the world."

Deep Cuts

Happily for Sr. Milei, he has the will of the people behind him. Despite what the toadies in the mainstream press would have us believe, the vast majority of Argentine voters actually support the economic and political reforms Milei’s administration is delivering. 

According to the latest poll conducted by DC Consultores, while 16% of respondents wanted him to continue either at a slower or moderated pace, more than 60% indicated they supported Milei continuing with even deeper, more aggressive reforms. 

All in, over three quarters (76.4%) of respondents support Milei’s historic reforms, while less than a quarter (23.6%) wish to see a return to the previous, socialist economic model. (No prize for guessing which group represents enterprising individuals, glad to be free of the shackles of the state… and which represents the political caste, who don’t want the corrupt gravy train to end.)

Half a century has passed since Argentina’s greatest writer and public intellectual, Jorge Luis Borges, imagined aloud a time when his fellow citizens “will deserve to be free of government.”

Month by month... day by day... paso a paso... the good people of Argentina are finally realizing that dream. 

¡Viva la libertad, carajo!

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

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. Might unpopular ideas – free markets, civil liberties, common sense – be enjoying a resurgence… even in the woke West?

Might thoughtful individuals be ready to ditch the ‘statist quo’ in favor of a more peaceful, voluntary existence?

Might citizens be ready to shrug off the illusion of choice proffered by their would-be political leaders and their puerile porters in the mainstream press?

Such a reality might be closer than you think. Already, millions of people in hundreds of countries have tuned out of state propaganda, meant only to divide, conquer and impoverish people.

How do we know?

Well, we don’t… but we have reason to be cautiously optimistic. Even these humble Notes now reach dear readers in all 50 states across the US… and in 130 countries around the world. Not bad, given that we only just kicked off this year.

Of course, the ideas of freedom, liberty and independence are not going to spread themselves. And that’s where our dear members come in. Thanks to their support, we are able to remain fully independent… which means no advertisements, no bosses and no bias.

Just free markets, free minds and free people… all the time.

If you’d like to support our work and join the growing community of folks interested in these lately resurgent ideas, please consider becoming a Notes member today. Cheers!