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High unemployment means cheaper services

And in other news: Argentina's poverty rate jumped from almost 42% to 53% during the first six months of Javier Milei's presidency (https://apnews.com/article/argentina-milei-budget-congress-economy-inflation-c83178217097093d476fab94429768a4)

Appeasing the market needs humans sacrifice! Once the rich get their fill, the poor will... anyway who cares about the poor.

Milei is a Christian, authoritarian, regressive fascist.

And he would never have gotten into power if the Argentinian left had respected the independence of the central bank, been more pragmatic with their subsidies and let the market decide more of their economy. Protectionism doesn't work and Argentina is a shining beacon letting everyone know that.

The left in Argentina did this to themselves. Even the trade unions in Argentina are struggling with support because they're seen as complicit in the country's wild overspending.

Obviously, for neoliberals starving their own population to increase the imaginary numbers for foreign imperialist rentiers is more than acceptable, it is essential

Freezing investment into the country and nuclear grade austerity will always bring inflation to an almost stand still. You're literally tossing liquid nitrogen on your economy, it's absolutely going to freeze.

The IMF does not expect the Argentine economy to grow this year, but rather to decline by 3.5%, while it should start growing next year.

And this is the key aspect that usually makes people who consider this pause for a second. Because freezing your economy might solve the right now problem, it also has the ability to ice economic activity completely, triggering an economic depression. This is the "balance" so to say. The harder your freeze, the more you'll need to rewarm the markets to get your economy going again.

President Milei and the government hope that the new laws, which offer investors decades of tax and customs relief, will quickly attract capital and curb the recession.

This has always been the super tricky part of the weapons grade austerity. The what comes after part. So Milei has done it, he's cooled the markets and supply has nearly cratered in the country. The next steps is to get production back and start pesos in the country to start flowing again.

I've always been a bit irresolute about Milei's approach on the economy. I'm not against it, it's just a strategy that's playing with fire in a gun powder factory. First and foremost, I hope that the people in Argentina find economic stability, because boy do they deserve it. So to that end I hope WHOEVER succeeds in getting that done. And second, I really hope this is something that can be long lasting. Hyper austerity has a history of bad boomerang effects. It can work, it's just takes a ton of work, more than most governments are willing to invest. And so there's a big chance that we could start to see some positive only to then watch it completely crumble once again.

If I was a leader, this isn't exactly a strategy I would pick. There's just a ton of places where it can go all wrong. But I hope the guy gets it fixed once and for all. But dang, I don't know how dude is smiling in that photo because if I was going down this road I wouldn't be able to sleep properly.

Seems a bit early to tell if this will have much of a lasting effect. So-called economic "shock therapies" have a long history of working for a year or so, and then unraveling later. And especially for Argentina, the cycle of decades of growth followed by decades of recession has been going on for a while now. I'll be genuinely impressed if he manages to actually fix the economy long-term, but that still remains to be seen.

But the people are unemployed and in poverty.