The delegation headed by Javier Milei and Luis Caputo is in Switzerland at the Davos International Forum where they will hold meetings with officials from the International Monetary Fund and large mining, pharmaceutical and agricultural businessmen. With growing inflation and increasing poverty, the Argentine government gave priority to meetings with large international capital in search of support for its adjustment plan and attack on the great majorities. Nothing good can be expected.
This afternoon the Chief of Staff Nicolás Posse and the Minister of Economy Luis Caputo met with the number two of the IMF after Kristalina Georgieva, Gita Gopinath, where they discussed the “Staff Level Agreement”. Last Wednesday Caputo had confirmed a first agreement with the fund, where the international organization will make a disbursement of US$ 4.7 billion as part of resuming the Extended Facilities plan that was suspended to pay the capital maturities of December 2023, February and April of this year. In the coming weeks the IMF board will meet to confirm approval of the disbursement.
As a counterpart, the government seeks to exceed the goals with a fiscal adjustment of 5 points of GDP, around US$ 30,000 million, to achieve a primary surplus equivalent to 2% of GDP, that is, 2.9 percentage points greater than the original goal. Meanwhile, interest payments on the fraudulent debt will continue to be made with Central Bank reserves that are in critical condition.
In this framework, a meeting between Caputo and Posse with Kristalina Georgieva was agreed for Wednesday, before the meeting with Javier Milei, which will be their first meeting with the director of the organization.
Prior to the meeting with Argentine officials, Georgieva had declared this Tuesday that, from the organization, “progress has been observed on all fronts” of the Argentine economy since Javier Milei took office. “What this administration is doing is very aggressively correcting some of the deficiencies that we all see. Fiscally, they are spending more than they can. The reserves are empty. So we are seeing progress on all these fronts,” He told the Bloomberg agency.
For his part, the Minister of Economy will have meetings with pharmaceutical businessmen, bankers, miners and representatives of the agricultural multinational Louis Dreyfus and the technology company Amazon. Likewise, he will participate in a panel titled “Prevention of economic fractures,” which seems sarcastic after his failed stint as Macri’s minister.
The IMF shows its support for measures that it has historically prescribed for the country and that have increasingly led to heartbreaking and deeper crises, while increasing dependence on the interests of the United States and other dominant countries. The payment of a debt that is fraudulent from its origin generates consequences that are visible: greater poverty and an increase in prices, which reaches alarming levels. Nothing good will come from strengthening its ties with big international capital.
This January 24, the left seeks to organize in each workplace and in each neighborhood the active preparation of the strike, discussing in assemblies and meetings the massiveness, both at the time of stopping and in the mobilization, and demanding from the union leaders a plan of fight to defeat the attacks of the Milei government and the IMF.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
