The plot as a response to everything by a government at a crossroads. Editorial of “El CĂ­rculo Rojo”, a program of La Izquierda Diario that is broadcast every Thursday from 10 pm to 12 am on Radio Con Vos 89.9.

  • If we stick to the government’s discourse on the cause of its problems, we would have to conclude that it is surrounded by traitors and is the victim of permanent conspiracies.
  • The use of conspiracy theories is not new in governments with problems in general and in the experiences of these right-wing groups in particular.
  • The success of conspiracy theories lies in the fact that, well, they simplify the explanation to make sense of complex problems; they respond to a few variables with a clear and identifiable enemy and offer a very simple and sometimes even quite logical explanation. All these theories contain almost identical elements. For example, the idea that “nothing happens by chance”, the conviction that events have a “hidden plot” and the certainty that there is someone behind pulling the strings of everything.
  • They are part of an “epistemic distrust” typical of The age of conspiracyas the journalist Ignacio Ramonet titled his book, this is a distrust in the veracity of the facts (and in the very concept of truth) that is very characteristic of times of crisis of legitimacy in political systems and ideological representations.
  • In an attempt to “make sense” of this widespread distrust, governments are circulating conspiracy theories as an alternative to a rational explanation of what is happening. Now, this can be effective in the immediate tactical realm. In the medium term, reality imposes itself by its own weight.
  • For example, President Javier Milei today (Thursday) went out to cross his recently fired former economic advisers, Fausto Spotorno and Teddy Karagozian, who were fired for their criticism of the economic program, and accused the former of wanting to steal information for his private consulting firm. He did so through a tweet in which he referred to both of them without naming them. “ORIGIN OF THE BETRAYAL” (sic), Milei titled his post on social media and wrote: “One betrayed because he wanted to steal confidential information to make the consultancy more profitable. The other did it after failing to impose his prebendary agenda. There are many analysts who are very naive and/or intellectually very dishonest.”
  • Spotorno is a member of the consulting firm OJF and Associates run by Orlando Ferreres, and Karagozian is a textile businessman (he would be the one with the prebendary interests).
  • A few days earlier, Milei had accused Banco Macro, an Argentine-owned bank and the third largest private bank in the country, of promoting a kind of “market coup” that led to a surge in the price of parallel dollars. According to Milei, Macro “tried to destabilize” the government on June 3 by liquidating 1.8 trillion pesos (1.8 billion dollars) in bonds of the state’s debt with the bank, which forced the Central Bank to issue currency to pay them. According to the president, the hand of the massismo was behind the operation.
  • What is the idea that Milei wants to install with these versions? That the rise in financial dollars, the fall in Argentine bonds and the rise in country risk that occurred three weeks ago after a press conference by the Minister of Economy and the president of the Central Bank (Luis Caputo and Santiago Bausili), had nothing to do with the inconsistencies of the economic plan (which that same conference made clear), but with the hidden hands of actors behind the scenes that caused the “destabilization.”
  • In this way, he blames the actions of Banco Macro (which, to tell the truth, did sell those bonds, but precisely because the Government was transferring the debt to a less reliable payer – from the Central Bank to the Treasury), added to the criticisms of Spotorno and Karagozian, which caused the mess. If that had not happened, everything would have been going swimmingly.
  • The problem with these theories is that, in the same moment that they are stated, they contradict themselves. Because if a bank and two second-tier advisors can destabilize your economic plan, the reason is not the strength of those actors, but the weakness of the plan. And that is where the entire conspiracy narrative falls apart for those who want to see it. It is true that many “don’t see it” because they don’t want to see it, but as Patricia Bullrich said in that anthology intervention: “You will understand it.”
  • The problem, among many that the Government has, is that in order to maintain the only successful indicator that its economic plan has shown so far: the reduction of inflation, it is paying an increasingly high price. Not only economic, but also political and doctrinal.
  • From an economic point of view, it had to stop talking long ago about the famous “V-shaped recovery” and all the figures show a collapse because the “anchor” of inflation is the brutal recession we are witnessing.
  • From a political point of view, the consulting firms that have had the best numbers for the Government show that (although it has not yet substantially affected Milei as an individual figure) there is increasingly more pessimism that the situation will improve and concerns such as the fear of unemployment are growing.
  • And finally, from a doctrinal point of view, they are burning all the manuals of their “libertarianism” and the “Austrian school” and that “the market regulates itself” and other nonsense, because they are carrying out a fierce interventionism to try to narrow the gap (between the parallel dollars and the official one), because that generated an inflationary risk (among others). But they do this with measures that at the same time generate distrust in other sectors, for example, in the holders of Argentine debt bonds: because if they are going to raffle off the dollars (to contain the parallel ones), then they are resigning themselves to accumulating fewer reserves and, therefore, future payments are more at risk, especially those of next year, which are very large.
  • These are the real contradictions that the Government faces, and in any case, it is in this scenario that the criticisms or movements of some economic actors operate. All the other conspiracies or plots, paraphrasing the great John Kennedy Toole, are only in the heads of fools.

  • Banco Macro / Luis Caputo / Javier Milei / Santiago Bausili / Economy / Central Bank

    Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com



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