Javier Milei has traveled to the United States for the fourth time since he was elected president of Argentina at the end of 2024. None of them, including this Monday, was to meet with his American counterpart, Joe Biden. His latest trip to the heart of world capitalism has an economic objective: to publicize his government program and attract foreign capital to Argentina. This Monday, at the global conference of the Milken Institute, Milei asked the big businessmen gathered in Los Angeles to bet on Argentina to transform it into “the new Rome of the 21st century.” Milei assured them that “Argentina has all the conditions to be the new mecca of the West.”
Several international exhibitions of Milei, since the first at the Davos Forum, have put the spotlight on this 53-year-old economist who calls businessmen “heroes” and urges them to fight socialism in the 21st century. This Monday, Milei’s energetic tone at the Milken Institute once again attracted all eyes on him with a speech very similar to the previous ones. According to the Argentine president’s vision, Argentina has become impoverished due to decades of populist and pro-State policies that he has stopped in its tracks with an unprecedented cut in public spending. Now, the president emphasizes, the country has everything in place to begin a process of economic convergence that places it on par with the great powers of the world with high growth rates.
Words are currently insufficient to convince businessmen. Investing in Argentina is risky: the country today has the highest inflation in the world (288% year-on-year) and has a long history of defaulting on payments and breaching contracts. Investors want facts: laws that provide legal certainty, tax benefits and free movement of capital. They also require guarantees that they will be maintained for a time long enough to make the invested capital profitable. That is, they will not be eliminated by the next government in a new pendulum of the country’s economic direction.
These ideas are the backbone of Milei’s state reform law, which is moving towards legislative approval after five months in power. The Chamber of Deputies gave it the green light last week and it is now beginning to be debated in the Senate. If a favorable result is also obtained, Milei will have extraordinary powers for one year to privatize public companies, close state agencies, make labor laws more flexible and give 30 years of tax benefits to large companies. Focused on maintaining the helm of the economy, Milei delegates negotiations with the opposition to his team.
Praise for Musk
Milei has meetings with businessmen in the United States on the agenda. The most anticipated is that she will have it this Monday with billionaire Elon Musk for the second time in a month. The Argentine president encourages him to be among the pioneers in investing under his presidency. “I don’t want to stop celebrating my friend Elon Musk’s effort to set foot on Mars,” he said during his speech at the Milken Institute about the founder of Space to be confined to this planet,” he added.
As in Davos, Milei again warned that the West is at risk and urged international leaders to follow his path. “I look at Argentina with all the changes we are undertaking and I see that we are against the world,” she told an audience dominated by investors and businessmen. “While the West turns towards control and imposition, Argentina turns towards the trust of its citizens in the exercise of their freedom. While the West turns towards economic shamanism and towards unsustainable formats of heterodoxy that endanger the future of all, Argentina returns to the path of reason, to the ideas of common sense,” continued the Argentine president.
The Argentine president aspires to play an important role in the international arena and his numerous trips abroad – Switzerland, the United States, Israel, Italy and the Vatican – contrast with the few trips he has made to the interior provinces of Argentina: he has only visited five of them. the 23 that Argentina has and in one of them, Tierra del Fuego, he made a lightning trip to meet with the commander of the US Army’s Southern Command, Laura Richardson, and announce the construction of a joint naval base.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS América newsletter and receive all the key information on current events in the region.
