Today in Argentina there are a dozen exchange rates for the dollar. There was a quote referring to an international music band and another one used to be established, depending on the size or figure of the characters that appear on the bills. A unique case in modern countries and ours can be considered within that group.. We integrate the G-20not even remotely a similar case can be replicated there.
How did we get here and fundamentally how we go out? We are days away from a momentous election and once again the dollar steals all the limelight. Worse still: it unleashes anguish, anxiety, uncertainty, fear of millions of compatriots who, even though they do not have a single US bill in their possession, know that this will alter their lives and not precisely for the better.
Even worse, we are facing a political and economic administration that for four years not only has not found a solution to the problem of continuity, but rather tends to aggravate it more and more. They were four years of a government that dedicated itself to squandering time and effort on internships, which took jobs from various Ministers of Economy (worth noting) rather than resolving the issue and to top it all off, not even being able to prevent it from getting worse.
Dollarization divides Argentina: exit or entrance to the economic labyrinth?
Infinite regulations and windows for “order” something as virtuous as trade and something as essential as foreign trade, which is what generates the foreign currency that we lack. Traps that all they do is block, suffocate even more an economy overwhelmed by subsidies, with exorbitant tax burdens, discouragement of business, destruction of the symbolic and monetary value of work. Runaway inflation.
A chaotic scene, by all accounts. With a pre-candidate for President who presents himself as a solution when for a year he has been responsible for looking for solutions that are more distant every day. Einstein summed this up with the precision of the genius that he was: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
This government is not going to change. It didn’t until now, what can you make believe that it will in the future? With which: there will be no changes. That is why I maintain that the phrase coined by Patricia Bullrich also applies to the problem of the dollar, in this final stretch of the campaign prior to the PASO: “If it’s not everything, it’s nothing.” Because the dollar cannot be isolated from that chaotic whole that led to the negligence, incompetence and foolishness of Kirchnerism.
If it’s not everything, it’s nothing. If a correct diagnosis of the problem is not made, it is nothing. If it does not stop displaying agro-export sector as an enemy, it is nothing. If an economy is not calibrated with its references altered by a multiplicity of subsidies and highly distortionary taxes, it’s nothing. If the value of fundamental virtues such as work is not recovered, it is nothing.
The day after dollarization
Objectively, Argentina is a rich country. It has wide regions of the most productive land on the planet. It has a sea of enormous wealth. He has energy. It has a formidable talent in its population. He has knowledge. It has heroes, epic history, values, tradition. It has men and women who never gave up. But all that is reduced to nothing.
Unfortunately, far from seeing all these virtues reflected in our reality, we feel poor. Bucked by the dollar. But the dollar is an emerging (no minor, it is true) of the general disaster into which the Executive Branch of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Kirchner plunged us.
Most of the economic models are structured from a political worldview. An idea. Of guiding axes that structure the business and productive sectors, the labor forcefinancial institutions, the objectives of the country.
In any case, trust is the essential intangible value that economic, social and political actors need for this idea of a country to crystallize. That is why it also applies to the dollar: If it is not everything, it is nothing. EITHER we change everything that needs to be changed. Or nothing changes.
* Pre-candidate for Senator of the Nation for “Fuerza del Cambio” (Patricia Bullrich), Together for Change