Milei's Wall Street shuffle
Milei doubtless imagined that he was ringing his own Liberty Bell but it was also a self-excommunication from the international community which might well send alarm-bells ringing, not least among Wall Street investors.
The week started for the man on top at least with President Javier Milei ringing the bell on Wall Street to set the New York stock market up and running. Now bells have a variety of uses and meanings – as a summons to worship, to sound an alarm or simply as a means of attracting attention, among others, with the Liberty Bell symbolising United States independence perhaps the most famous of them all – and most of these can be applied to Milei.
Tuesday’s address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York would be a case in point – Milei doubtless imagined that he was ringing his own Liberty Bell to a world threatened with the regimentation of Agenda 2030 and the “Pact for the Future” but it was also a “bell, book and candle” self-excommunication from the international community which might well send alarm-bells ringing, not least among Wall Street investors. If people are to be judged by the company they keep, Milei was joined in spurning the UN Pact for the Future by a Venezuela seeking his arrest, Russia, North Korea and Nicaragua among others while the 143 countries signing up for this “collectivist” tyranny included Lula’s Brazil, the Spain of Pedro Sánchez and Labour Britain but also the United States and Israel (the two countries Milei admires most in the world) and Giorgia Meloni’s Italy.
The reasons for rejecting the Pact for the Future can usually be found in a preference for going back to the past and here Milei would seem to be no exception with a nostalgia for the 19th century finding little good to say about anything since 1916 (the beginning of universal suffrage). Yet the chauvinistic nationalism of most Agenda 2030 critics is the antithesis of true libertarian thinking – if the nation-state is an established concept, that is because when nations seek to do things differently, state intervention is usually the ideal vehicle. The alternative to the UN vision of multilateralism is not only to retreat into a nation-state past but also to accelerate into the global technology of the future, bypassing states altogether – such is the dream of not so much Wall Street as Silicon Valley, where Milei has even more friends.
When Milei rang the bell on Wall Street last Monday, he may have seen it as not only a signal to commence trading shares but also a summons for worship of his “zero deficit” creed. Yet the stock exchange prelude to the UN forum did little to enhance his credibility. His alignment with anachronistic nationalism could be overlooked as a rhetorical and theoretical deviation by markets more interested in the facts but these are also on a collision course with doctrine – how can the world’s first anarcho-capitalist president placing Argentina “in the vanguard of the defence of liberty” have some of the planet’s strictest currency and capital controls after almost 10 months in power?
Milei’s timetable for exit from the ‘cepo’ capital controls only seems to have intensified doubts because “once there is zero inflation under the macro-economic programme” sounds like never. If the President’s words are sedulously parsed, it will be found that zero does not actually mean zero but rather nothing in addition to global inflation and his crawling peg monthly devaluation (a mechanism inherited from the previous government which he defends as his own baby) which total some 2.5 percent while pointing out that wholesale inflation is already down to 2.1 percent. But how many potential investors are going to dig that deep instead of walking away with “zero inflation” in their heads? We are always being told that a book should not be judged by its cover but in money markets where snap decisions need to be made in a world with even more countries than the 193 UN members, books are being judged by the cover all the time.
Anyway, Milei is no longer on the East River in New York but back home, having flown out to Córdoba within hours of his return to monitor the forest fires there in gratuitously ostentatious military kit. Elsewhere a winter of discontent yet to be banished by the arrival of spring is smouldering, as measured by consumer confidence even more than his popularity ratings – nothing irreversible but Milei should dedicate less time to pontificating abroad and more to hands-on government at home.