“The entire Government is in the same situation. We feign insanity. We act as if the Libra Case did not exist, or as if Adorni’s travels did not exist“. The phrase was the way that an important official of the Casa Rosada found to describe the way of acting that multiplied among the members of the Cabinet in recent days, when those two storms began to grow towards a size that today is still impossible to calculate.
The President seems convinced that this is a good strategy that can be replicated on other levels, and that is why he kept on his agenda a bizarre trip to Hungary, to once again participate in a CPAC seminar, the franchise of right-wing speakers that has him almost as a permanent participant in different countries around the world. A few days after returning from Spain, where he participated in a similar fair, Milei decided to embark on the Magyar adventurein which he will probably meet the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbanwho will risk his position in the elections next month. There, in the hours he will spend in Budapest, Milei will be able to do the math and calculate whether it is convenient for him to keep the chief of staff in his profitable state refuge.Manuel Adorni, who every day adds one more stain to his coat, or releases it so that he can once again seek a livelihood in the jungle of the private sector.
On some occasions, that idea, that of acting as if a problem had no visibilityserves governments to get through a bad time that does not cloud a good outlook. This is not the case with what happens to Milei today.
The market seems to have detected that simulating dementia is not enough. Yesterday, the Country Risk reached 633 points, the highest level of the year. That happened a day after the Minister of Economy assured that the Government has the money to pay the debt maturities. Strictly speaking, it is no longer relevant whether Luis Caputo tells the truth or not: investors act as if what comes out of the minister’s mouth is not true. It’s hard to say, but in financial markets – and Caputo knows this well – intentions count for little.
You don’t have to look among the big market players to detect this distrust, Caputo himself recalled on Thursday. the enormous eagerness of savers to buy dollars which exploded last year and which, it seems, is still very vital in 2026.
There is a question that several economists ask themselves who look with sympathy at what the Government has done so far. Is Milei going to change or do you plan to continue with this economy that is making its problems increasingly visible?
Now, with the official numbers in hand, it is already known that the growth vectors chosen by the libertarian government – the exports generated by mining, energy and agriculture – are very important but are not enough to keep a country like Argentina afloat. The first two, despite the fact that they are growing faster and faster, they generate fewer and fewer jobs. If the main bet of Milei’s economic model does not generate employment, what perspective do the other areas have?
For several years, economic literature has been warning about the problems that the acceleration of robotization in industry generates for employment. The poorest societies, or middle-income countries, like Argentina, seemed safe from this disease of the rich, because low wages delayed investments to achieve more productivitysuch as the assembly of production lines and robotic processes. Producing with people, in less prosperous countries, was still cheaper than buying robots.
But today something else happens. The speed with which Artificial Intelligence advances, and above all the low cost that these platforms still have for their users, are already destroying jobs, especially in sectors such as the knowledge industrybut also on desks dedicated to providing services.
What does Milei think about this new normal? Several times the President took photos with Silicon Valley titans and announced the arrival of companies that develop Artificial Intelligence to Argentina, but he never said how the country is preparing to face this unknown future. It is true that Local oil companies will benefit from the prices brought by the war between Israel and the United States against Iranbut if even in those gaps of abundance there are layoffs, it is not difficult to realize that today there are almost no jobs left in Argentina that are not to some extent at risk.
In Argentina, as always happens, these global storms appear reinforced by local catastrophes. The monetary squeeze and the fiscal adjustment that Milei promoted brought the consequence that the books anticipated: the cooling of consumption and other variables of the economy. But the Government did not foresee that, at this stage of the game, inflation was still alive. A 3% monthly rate, according to economists, is a number that has its own problems: one of them is inertia, which gives the following month’s price variation a floor that is difficult to break. Today, Milei’s team finds that the three anchors it imagined are still well buried – the dollar tends to fall again, the monetary base is reduced and the fiscal surplus remains the same – but the ship of inflation creaks its ropes and keeps some sail unfurled. Does this economic organization have a future or will Milei once again have to dust off the pragmatism he once exhibited and stop feigning insanity?
