Half-baked complaints that reveal a complete system of looting. Economy column from El Círculo Rojo, a program from La Izquierda Diario on Radio Con Vos, 89.9. In text and video.
- On Sunday night, the candidate minister, Sergio Massa, anticipated in the interview he gave to Luis Majul on LN+ that at the end of November the IMF will begin “the investigation into the flight of capital from the 2018 loan.”
- He was referring to the loan taken by the government of Mauricio Macri. Massa explained that The Fund will send “a commission to Argentina that will carry out a review of the 66% that, according to the AGN (General Audit of the Nation), was not used to finance hospitals, schools or to resolve economic stability. but to finance the payment to investment funds”.
- As reported by the Bloomberg agency, the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office confirmed that it will visit the country. But the visit appears to be routine. It will be to evaluate the design of the program and the application of policies. This Fund Office, presumably, is independent of the technical staff and the Executive Board of the Fund.
- The former director of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department, Alejandro Werner, accused Massa of “being very close to lying” when he said that the Fund is coming to investigate capital flight.
- This former Fund official was involved in the negotiations with the Marchist government, which is why he defends the program agreed in 2018, although he says that capital control should have been reinforced. That is to say that he, in his own way, recognizes that the loan financed the flight of capital, something that he should have avoided.
- There is something more interesting in what Werner stated. He said that “Argentina was experiencing a ‘substitution’ of creditors. Some private ones were replaced by the IMF. That was seen from the design of the program, it was discussed and that does not present any problem regarding the legality of the program, according to the lawyers of the international department.”
- In this way, Werner recognizes that the program was designed so that the IMF becomes a creditor to replace other creditors, which he does not specify, but which are presumably investment funds, mostly from New York.
- To be clearer: the IMF provided dollars for investment funds to take out of the country.
- What Werner recognizes is at the limit of what the Fund’s own statute prevents: that is, financing the outflow of capital. Except that Werner defends that this is totally legal.
- Massa is correct in denouncing that the IMF, in agreement with the Cambia government, financed the dollarization of the investment funds that operate in Argentina.
- But if this is questionable, so is the authorization that Martín Guzmán requested from Congress in 2020 to issue bonds in dollars to favor the dollarization of two investment funds that wanted to withdraw from the country: these are Pimco and Templeton.
- This operation, where two investment funds that had securities in pesos were given access to securities in dollars, is also in contradiction with the Financial Administration Law because it worsened the profile of public debt.
- Guzmán obtained approval from Congress at a time when Massa presided over the Chamber of Deputies. The current candidate minister did not say anything, neither then nor now.
- The mechanisms of capital flight are several. A very important one is the payment of fictitious private debt in dollars. These are companies that ask the Central Bank for cheap dollars to pay off liabilities abroad that are not such.
- Under this modality, almost US$25 billion was spent between 2020 and 2022, according to the Cifra Center. All this looting occurred without the ruling party carrying out any investigation.
- What happened during the Macrista government to a certain extent has already been investigated. A Central Bank report published in 2020 indicates that capital flight in the exchange era was US$86 billion.
- Of that total, a small group of 100 agents made net purchases for USD 24,679 million. That report was a half-hearted complaint because it did not even offer the names of those 100 agents.
- It was the journalist Horacio Verbitsky who revealed on his portal El Cohete a la Luna the ranking of the one hundred companies that fled the most during the Macri administration. Telefónica, Pampa Energía, General Motors, Shell, Quilmes, Monsanto, Aluar, Procter & Gamble, Arcor and Techint, among many others, stood out.
- The IMF’s adventures always give the same result: it provides financing for the capital flight of the economic elite and leaves a debt that the working people pay with adjustment.
- The current government could have objected to that debt as soon as it took over. Or for exceptional reasons during the pandemic or at the time of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
- On the contrary, it was validated in Congress at the beginning of last year when the new agreement reached by Guzmán with the IMF had the votes of a large part of Together for Change, votes achieved thanks to the willing efforts of Sergio Massa, who for He then presided over the Chamber of Deputies.
- Massa could sing to the IMF, as Joaquín Sabina sings. With what law to condemn you, if we are judge and all part of your adventures?
Economy / National Economy / Dollar / IMF / Sergio Massa / Capital flight / The Red Circle
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
