This year Argentina has a new president, one Mauricio Macri. The fellow stands very strongly on the side of capital and against labour, with daily pronouncements drawing the ire of the grobian-socialistoid Argentine1. His position is not unreasonable – scarcely could there be found on the globe a more economically worthless2, delusionally self-valuating group of perambulating troglodytes (with the obvious exception of the United States, of course).
This year Argentina no longer has something that it had for almost seventy years, coinciding exactly with the slow drift from the world's fifth economic power in the 1950s to one of the third world's poorest shitholes today : the Partido Justicialista, political manifestation of Peronismo, a sort of national-socialism with, if not a human face, then necessarily a chicken brain. The whorefaced dowager of the inexplicably3 popular Nestor Kirschner is out of office, and should she live long enough will in all likelihood end up in prison over her murdering of an obscure DA by the name of Alberto Nisman. The peronists have absolutely nobody else, as far as leadership goes. In the street the situation is even worse for them – their constant calls for public demonstrations fail to interest more than a handful of low ranking politruks from their own ranks, sad gatherings which the government systematically humiliates with ample police cordons and overgenerous deployment of fences and assorted equipment. Sic transit a garland of inept stupidity that has choked and strangled a country during the better part of a century.
This year Argentina also no longer has something that it had every single year since it gained independence, which is to say stores of corn. As part of complicated negotiations around the swamp that used to be the country's economy, Macri made an agreement with the large agribusiness that the government lets the dollar go4, while the agros start selling. The intention was to get the cash crops (mostly soy) moving. However, for reasons that could only be entertained by a 6 grader, the soy producers had expected that letting the dollar go will result in a price even higher than the black market5. When this dream failed to materialize they demured. The corn producers jumped on the opportunity, however, and agricultural receipts in the first quarter of 2016 are more than double the receipts of the same period last year – on the back of a above-tenfold increase in corn stocks liquidation. Which stocks may have been needed for later – who knows. Argentina es un pais muy rico en recursos umanos.
But this year Argentina has something that it never had for very many years – a visiting US president! Senor Hussein Bahamas will be here towards the end of the month, along an impressive headcount of 850 camp followers, mostly whores and bureaucrats. He will however studiously avoid the capital, either because I'm here or else because he's petrified of being firebombed by the local socialists, which hate him about as much as the Arabs do. Imagine if you will the embarassment for the acting… ass of the Democrat party having to explain the headbumps, seared eyebrows and Irish sunglasses acquired from local socialists while visiting Latin America.
By and large – Macri is here to stay, and the country is running out of polenta. Plan your retirements / mail bride orders accordingly.
"Hay que reducir los gastos, y el salario es un gasto mas" (Macri) – "El salario es un derecho [umano]!11" (the G-S A).
"Argentina necessita aprender a respectar el capital" (Macri) – "Zzzzz" (G-S A asleep in the shop, 4 pm on a workday)
The list goes on, and it constitutes a ready comedy goldmine for the rootless cosmopolitan in attendance. ↩
Just take in the notion that restaurants here actually close for a full month to six weeks each year – leaving the entire capital investment to rot disused because hey, the labour no quiere trabajar. ↩
Quite explicable : he died before the effects of his idiocies could be actually felt, replicating over the years almost exactly Peron's own good fortune. The same good fortune that Napoleon decried not being blessed with upon entering Moscow ("oh if only I had the good fortune to be cut down by a stray cannonball, I'd be a hero!"). ↩
For a long time the PJ in power was pretending the value of a peso in dollars to be somewhere around 0.125, whereas the Chinese speculators pegged it closer to 0.06. ↩
This is sheer idiocy : if the government prices a token at 1, and the free market prices the token at 2, then the government giving up on the pretense can not possibly result in a final price for the token higher than 2. It must necessarily settle somewhere between 1 and 2.
To understand this with examples : say the token is valued at 1 by the government and at 2 by the black market. Say that every day there's demand for 100 dollars that is met by the government, and for 50 further dollars that is met by the black market. This means there's a total of 200 pesos chasing 150 dollars, of which 100 pesos are satisfied at the rate of 1, and 100 more are satisfied at the rate of 2. If the government quits, the same 150 dollars as before are coming to market, to meet the same 200 pesos as before. The rate can not possibly settle at, for instance, 10, because there aren't 1500 pesos available to cover 150 dollars 10:1. Nor could it settle at 2.02, as there aren't 303 pesos chasing the 150 dollars anymore than there are 1500.
Depending on the respective trade volumes one can more or less guess where the price will end up before the pretense is abandoned – provided, of course, that one took Algebra II instead of "Statisticis and Etatistensheep" in school. ↩