News of op ed

Making public private

Yesterday 05:55 Not the first contradiction with its self-image but a government calling itself libertarian and seeking to restrict access to public information is really starting to take the biscuit.

EDITORIAL

Libertarian entrapment

31-08-2024 05:21 The paradox of a libertarian government revering the free market while unable to exit bureaucratic Kirchnerite capital controls has already drawn comment but the reduction of the PAIS tax exposes another contradiction.

EDITORIAL

Tinkering and tailoring the judge and the spy

24-08-2024 05:55 While “Big Brother” espionage would seem to contradict the libertarian creed in general, the nomination of the controversial federal judge Ariel Lijo for the Supreme Court flies in the face of Milei’s electoral crusade against a corrupt “caste.”

Editorial

Inflation down on its all fours?

17-08-2024 05:39 The main obstacle to zero inflation is zero certainty as to the future.

EDITORIAL

In default and by default

10-08-2024 05:45 The moral bankruptcy of the main opposition front is a vital lifeline for a government facing enormous difficulties in restructuring Argentina.

Nicolás Maduro, Javier Milei and Donald Trump

EDITORIAL

Region at a crossroads

27-07-2024 14:35 Navel-gazing is taking a rest in Argentina in this winter holiday week with eyes turned elsewhere – to the Olympics in Paris, to the recent series of game-changers in the United States elections and most immediately to presidential voting in Venezuela.

EDITORIAL

Between Tucumán and Asunción

13-07-2024 07:44 President Milei’s decision to skip the Mercosur summit does more to compromise Argentina’s future than his photograph and 10-point pact does to advance it.

EDITORIAL

Are youth votes wasted on the young?

06-07-2024 05:27 Electoral opportunism is at work.

Editorial

When Loan is a national debt

29-06-2024 04:22 On the nationwide clamour for the reappearance of a missing child.

EDITORIAL

And so it begins

22-06-2024 05:03 Javier Milei now prepares to move into the second half of the calendar year amid every indication of a whole new ball game.

EDITORIAL

Bases loaded with grand slam yet to come

15-06-2024 06:50 The Senate vote was a close-run thing but perhaps Milei gains more from near defeat within Congress and violence outside than from a comfortable and peaceful victory.

EDITORIAL

The buck stops where?

07-06-2024 16:53 The Congress vote to impose its own mechanism for updating pensions raises new doubts as to who is running this country.

EDITORIAL

Risky Investment Guarantee Inconsistencies

01-06-2024 05:45 The primacy of the fiscal over the economic causes problems elsewhere.

EDITORIAL

The pain in Spain falls mainly on the gain

25-05-2024 06:35 This dispute is far more easily personalised as being between President Milei and Spain’s PM Pedro Sánchez rather than between the two nations.

EDITORIAL

Single digit should not mean single issue

18-05-2024 06:13 Single-digit inflation relieves the poor more than anybody but comes at a price – must they also be the ones to pay it?

EDITORIAL

Contradictions and multitudes

11-05-2024 06:07 The Javier Milei Presidency has never been short of contradictions.

EDITORIAL

Loading the bases

04-05-2024 05:43 With a government yet to complete its first 150 days and Senate passage of Milei’s mega-law still lying ahead, we are not even at the end of the beginning.

EDITORIAL

Missing the point

27-04-2024 05:38 Milei misread the demonstration as “the caste” riding a noble cause to defend its interests but the scale, spontaneity and peaceful nature of the protest argue against this bid to politicise the march.

EDITORIAL

Pre-paid or re-paid?

20-04-2024 05:14 Subordinating medical fees to the dictates of a usually populist government did not work since it placed pricing hopelessly out of sync with the costs, but the naïve faith that the market could correct the damage of years in three months was a non-starter.

Editorial

The medium as the message

13-04-2024 05:54 Milei is the leader of a pack which competes to be the most outrageous but this week he seems to have been trumped by an underling: Alberto ‘Bertie’ Benegas Lynch.

Throwing the baby out of the bathwater with a lion laughing.

Editorial

Mixed messages

06-04-2024 06:29 While Argentina’s government has turned full circle between the two Easters from leftist populism to far right devotees of the market calling themselves libertarians, inflation persists as the basic fact of life .

EDITORIAL

The forces of Earth

30-03-2024 05:15 All the suffering of Good Friday was followed by Resurrection Sunday but can we be sure of the same sequence for Argentina?

EDITORIAL

48 years and 100 days later

23-03-2024 06:34 Tomorrow is the 48th anniversary of the 1976 military coup, while last Tuesday marked the classic first 100 days of the Javier Milei Presidency.

EDITORIAL

Belling terror

16-03-2024 06:41 The solution to drug crime bloodshed in Rosario is far from being as brutally simple as the problem, as some would seem to think.

Editorial

The Pact of May (or maybe?)

09-03-2024 06:30 This month and the next stand to be the eye of a perfect storm – a rare moment in the always abnormal Argentine economy which is a nightmare for spenders and savers alike.

EDITORIAL

Pouring oil on the flames

02-03-2024 05:57 If the spark that lit the fire was the threat of Chubut’s PRO Governor Ignacio Torres to cut off all oil and gas unless the cutbacks were reversed, this might appear a wild outburst – but it was less random and accidental than it might seem.

EDITORIAL

Poverty also in the debate

24-02-2024 06:08 Discussing figures is one thing and denialism quite another – this applies to the human rights debate and it also applies to poverty.

EDITORIAL

The summer of our discontent

17-02-2024 06:14 There is every reason to fear a vicious circle of devaluation and inflation continuing.

EUROPEAN POLITICS

Far right could exploit EU's economic slump to win big in June vote

13-02-2024 11:46 Soaring food costs, economic stagnation and deteriorating living standards risk pushing voters into the far right's arms in European elections later this year.

EDITORIAL

Who crashed the omnibus?

10-02-2024 06:47 The government must be considered the chief architect of the self-destruction of its megalomaniac omnibus bill.

EDITORIAL

An omnibus not for everybody

02-02-2024 14:46 Uncertainty is by no means limited to the final outcome of Javier Milei's bill in Congress.

EDITORIAL

The four horsemen

27-01-2024 07:35 The general strike should be deemed not so much a success or a failure as a somewhat irrelevant blip within what gives every indication of being a long hot summer and a traumatic year.

EDITORIAL

More holes than a Swiss cheese?

20-01-2024 06:57 No matter the distance from home, Argentine leaders always seem to be speaking to domestic galleries when addressing international audiences.

EDITORIAL

Prices out of the market

12-01-2024 15:24 President Milei wants to avoid the failures of Mauricio Macri’s gradualism but the shock approach might have too short a fuse.

Editorial

His own worst enemy?

06-01-2024 06:06 By multiplying the contents in its economic deregulation package, the government has only multiplied the already formidable obstacles lying ahead in Congress, adding the physical impossibility of finding the time to the stiff challenges of gaining approval with only tiny caucuses of almost embarrassingly raw legislators.

EDITORIAL

An electoral 2023 ends... and an electric 2024 begins

31-12-2023 08:14 The standard greeting of “Happy New Year” would represent wishful thinking rather than any real expectations when it comes to 2024, as President Javier Milei would be the first to insist.

EDITORIAL

Will crunch come to Grinch?

23-12-2023 06:55 While opinions are divided on whether Milei is finally transforming Argentina into a modern country or going disastrously wrong, there is a third option – that he is going nowhere in particular.

EDITORIAL

The lion enters his jungle

16-12-2023 06:03 Milei cannot be accused of not warning us that things would get much worse before they got better – what he did not say was how he would be moving in the opposite direction of the firebrand rhetoric he deployed during his pre-presidential existence.

EDITORIAL

Exit Alberto... and enter Milei

09-12-2023 08:01 Milei has to be seen as a work in progress – even if many would see him as a piece of work. But one thing is certain, he is where the buck stops, as from today.

EDITORIAL

The beginning of the end?

02-12-2023 10:18 If the popular vote failed to rally to defend acquired rights against Milei’s chainsaw, it is because those rights have been emptied for too many people falling outside the system.

EDITORIAL

Destination unknown

25-11-2023 13:34 Milei is a man of multiple contradictions too numerous for this space but he is about to face the biggest contradiction of them all – the outsider is days away from going inside.

EDITORIAL

A long road ends and a journey begins

18-11-2023 06:08 Nothing ends irreversibly tomorrow – rather than any apocalypse now, it needs to be seen within the grander context of these four continuing decades of democracy.

EDITORIAL

It’s up to you

11-11-2023 05:46 Reader, it is up to you. Choose wisely.

EDITORIAL

When two’s not company but three’s still a crowd

04-11-2023 05:00 A run-off normally reduces politics to its purest binary logic as a simple either/or proposition but the upcoming showdown between Sergio Massa and Javier Milei is rather more complex.

EDITORIAL

Decline and fall

28-10-2023 04:58 An internal crisis was always in the offing for Juntos por el Cambio but nobody was expecting the fragile unity to explode so openly within 48 hours.

EDITORIAL

Tomorrow never knows

21-10-2023 05:46 Tomorrow is the time to go beyond day-day thinking and ponder the next four years.

EDITORIAL

We’ve got the blues again

14-10-2023 05:20 Regardless of whether Milei is an economic terrorist or whether the government is the architect of its own destruction, the problems caused by the extreme volatility of this week’s four-digit dollar are all too real with panic price increases across the board.

EDITORIAL

Of dirty money and ‘dirty wars’

07-10-2023 06:40 With corruption being rubbed in its face by Insaurralde’s Marbella yacht jaunt and with the ballot-box in only a fortnight’s time as a readymade outlet, how will the citizenry react?

EDITORIAL

The poverty of politics

30-09-2023 05:00 One can only tremble at what levels poverty might reach for the second half of this year after last month’s double-digit inflation.

EDITORIAL

Of electoral and constitutional triangles

23-09-2023 05:05 Winning on October 22 will not be the end of the story.

EDITORIAL

Cheaper by the dozen?

16-09-2023 05:47 While there is more than one reading of Sergio Massa’s tax cuts, all lead to more inflation. If one side of political polarisation blames the fiscal deficit for rising prices and the other business greed, both are simplistic.

EDITORIAL

It’s not just the economy, stupid!

09-09-2023 05:25 In the last general elections in 2019 PASO primary winner Alberto Fernández was seconded by a woman whom nobody underestimated and today’s PASO primary winner Milei is seconded by a woman who perhaps should not be underestimated either.

EDITORIAL

Whither the plan, any plan?

02-09-2023 06:17 The disintegration of Sergio Massa’s electioneering package would seem to confirm that we are now in the embers of the current government but does the problem end there?

EDITORIAL

Blasts from the past?

26-08-2023 03:03 An often paranoid country’s attention being seized by the threat of mass lootings is understandable enough as evoking the 2001-2002 meltdown but it distracts attention from more potentially substantial developments.

EDITORIAL

Primary Avalanche Shatters Order

19-08-2023 08:21 Argentina’s general election is still nine weekends away but it has been turned on its head.

EDITORIAL

A nation votes and reality bites

10-08-2023 23:39 A brutal campaign brought the PASO primary campaign to a shuddering halt midweek – this black swan could end up resetting the central question of this election.

EDITORIAL

The price of victory

06-08-2023 19:09 The two main coalitions in this election are very differently poised with a battered Peronist government already coming up with its answer for better or for worse.

In all fairness to the current administration, any government would have problems with the catastrophic scale of this year’s drought making a US$20-billion hole in reserves but this begs the question of why the country does not have a currency of its own in the first place.

Editorial

An accident waiting to happen… and still waiting

28-07-2023 21:51 Not that any open rather than creeping devaluation was to be expected in the final fortnight before the PASO primaries, given its explosive impact on prices in the immediate rather than longer term as well as on the quasi-fiscal deficit with the huge volume of dollar-linked bonds.

If scaremongering is the most effective politics, as Massa seems to imply, this is due to a deep-seated and widespread fear of change and it is these politically exploited fears holding the country hostage which need to be overcome – not so much by the politicians as the people themselves.

Editorial

Hostages of fear

28-07-2023 21:41 Both a consensus approach and firm action are potentially valid avenues to a solution but both are also means towards ends and will depend entirely on their results – by themselves they are merely vapid campaign rhetoric.

EDITORIAL

A parlous parliament

15-07-2023 06:53 Congress might be virtually ignored in this election campaign and yet its pivotal role should not be underestimated by any of the presidential candidates.

EDITORIAL

Schools for scandal

07-07-2023 13:05 An eternal orphan of election campaigns, education has started to creep into public discussion despite stiff competition from the usual headlines.

EDITORIAL

Man of two worlds

01-07-2023 08:41 Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown but even more so when it wears two hats with the crown still distant.

EDITORIAL

The shape of things to come?

24-06-2023 01:16 Despite their deep divisions, as exposed by their problems in defining candidacies by today’s deadline, both major coalitions have unanimously toed a line representing half the truth at best.

EDITORIAL

Crime time versus electoral timetables

17-06-2023 06:01 If nature abhors a vacuum, democratic politics also needs new men and women to fill its leadership vacuum.

EDITORIAL

Back to the future?

10-06-2023 06:26 That famous “Begone with them all” 2001 slogan of anti-system outrage against politicians is now more in the air than at any time since then, while today’s currency seems to be entering irreversibly into a similar terminal phase.

EDITORIAL

Slow boat to China

03-06-2023 06:12 All policy here is driven by the desperation arising from the parlous state of Central Bank reserves.

EDITORIAL

Are 20 years really nothing?

27-05-2023 06:54 Those who expect a direct correlation between electoral success and economic growth would find Argentina again bucking the trend in the last 20 years.

EDITORIAL

April showers bring no May flowers

20-05-2023 07:00 There can be no doubt that inflation is public enemy number one.

Editorial

Much ado about almost nothing

13-05-2023 09:07 One constant of the current administration has been to prioritise the political and the judicial over the economic and the social, with this week a case in point.

EDITORIAL

The Book Fair as today’s Aleph

06-05-2023 06:21 There is a case for saying that the Buenos Aires International Book Fair itself is an Aleph of Argentine today.