On the same day that official figures showed that the Argentine economy is deepening its decline and unemployment is rising, President Javier Milei declares war on Rodrigo Valdés, Bachelet II’s former Finance Minister and current director of the Department of the Western Hemisphere ( WHD) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In a speech in Prague, where he arrived as part of a tour of Europe, Milei targeted the IMF for the liabilities accumulated in the Central Bank during the previous government and blamed “an IMF technician who turned a blind eye to this, someone with links to the São Paulo forum“.
Milei expanded on the attack on Valdés in a radio interview with journalist Eduardo Feinmann and accused him of having “leftist” sympathies.
Furthermore, journalist Carlos Pagni stated in his program that Javier Milei would have asked Kristalina Georgieva, the current Managing Director of the IMF, that Rodrigo Valdés not lead the negotiations with Argentina.
Milei’s government depends on the international fund for fresh dollars to arrive and sees Valdés as an obstacle.
The genesis of the discomfort is Staff Level Agreement of the IMF, a report of more than 100 pages that was released last week, and where the Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, is required to devalue and lift the stocks – a word to refer to government control of the purchase and sale of foreign currency and the foreign payment system. Valdés supervised that report.
The document would have gone down very badly with Minister Caputo, and it revealed that there is a struggle between the Argentine government and the international organization.
In the report, the IMF explicitly called for a system of managed floating of the exchange rate and gives as an example for Argentina to follow the model of Uruguay and Peru, with an independent central bank and no dollarization.
The controversy broke out when in Argentina they consider the arrival of the Chilean libertarian economist, José Luis Daza, to Caputo’s team to be imminent.
In his program on Monday, Carlos Pagni highlighted the irony of accusing Valdés of being leftist and recalled that the former Chilean minister – who worked at BTG Pactual and Barclays in New York – is a good friend of Federico Sturzenegger – former head of Macri’s central bank. and who was recently praised by Milei—. In fact, the Argentine president confirmed Sturzenegger’s arrival in his cabinet, but warned: “he is going to live with Caputo.”
“Sturzenegger is going to be in the deregulation of the State. “He is going to live with Caputo,” Milei told TN last week.
The mention of the Minister of Economy is not coincidental. According to instructions ClarionThe two economists have had a cold and tense relationship since Mauricio Macri’s administration when “Toto” occupied the position of Finance Secretary and “Sturze” presided over the country’s monetary authority, which Caputo would eventually occupy.
“I do the deregulation, the macro issues are for the minister (Caputo),” Sturzenegger said days ago, during a conference at the Hilton Hotel to appease the internal tension.
Pagni also showed a photo of Valdés with Sturzenegger in Chile along with José de Gregorio, former president of the Central Bank of Chile. The three economists met at MIT and that’s where the friendship came from.
