Javier Miley He will celebrate two years in the Casa Rosada on December 10 with a figure that, at any other time in the last two decades, would have sounded like science fiction for Argentina: an inflation that, after four consecutive cycles of uncontrolled increases, finally stopped accelerating.
It is far from being the end of the problem, but it does represent the first break in a country that suffered, at the end of the government of Alberto Fernández (2019-2023) and the Kirchnerist era, the corrosion of prices at levels not seen since 1990, when hyperinflation left severe consequences in the pockets of several generations of Argentines.
The journey to understand Argentina’s present forces us to return to more than two decades ago.
After the rearrangement of variables in the brief presidency of Eduardo Duhalde, who assumed power after the hasty resignation of Fernando de la Rúa due to the 2001 crisis, the first chapter of the new inflationary cycle began with the arrival of Néstor Kirchner in 2003.
During his four years in charge, inflation accumulated 60%. It was a high number, but still controlled when compared to what would come later: over time, that same figure would be practically reached in just a few accumulated months.
His wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner became president in 2007 in a country that was already showing tensions. In the second half of his first term, especially since 2010, inflation never returned to a floor below 10%. Quite the opposite: it began to climb.
And here comes a “blue inflation”. Between 2007 and 2011, Cristina “declared” accumulated inflation close to 120%. In his second term, the dynamic worsened and added more than 50 additional percentage points.
Between 2011 and 2015, the total price increase rose to 175%, but the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (Indec) cannot be cited, since it was intervened and the statistics were absolutely distorted.
In fact, the Secretary of Commerce from the first era of CFK, Guillermo Moreno, was sentenced to three years in prison and six years of disqualification from holding public office for manipulating public data.
Thus, with the official thermometer out of order, alternative measurements of the political opposition to Kirchnerism gained prominence: the CPI of the City of Buenos Aires and the CPI Congress – which took data from some provinces – calculated that only in CFK’s second presidential term did inflation rise between 140% and 176%, a gap that more clearly reflected the real cost of the inflationary distortion during those years.
In 2015, after a political turn that left Peronism out of power, President Mauricio Macri (PRO) inherited the situation with the promise of “fighting inflation” as the axis of his campaign and subsequent management, in addition to normalizing confidence in the Indec indices.
However, his administration, marked by the search for external financing and persistent exchange rate and political instability, closed his mandate in 2019 with an accumulated inflation of 300%, with an annual average of 40% and an evident acceleration towards the end. It was not a minor setback: it laid the foundations for a decade that had already been losing control of the value of the currency.
What came next surpassed everything seen. President Alberto Fernández aggravated the inheritance to historic levels: between 2019 and 2023, the Indec registered an accumulated inflation of 1,020%. Even 2023 ended with a CPI of 211.4% and a monthly jump of 25.5% in just December.
In this way, the last year of Fernández’s presidency was the worst for Argentina since the hyperinflation of 1990, after the cycle of Raúl Alfonsín and the beginning of that of Carlos Menem, when the index climbed to 1,344%.
The libertarian Javier Milei landed on a scenario of lack of price control in December 2023. And although the economic turn had its costs such as the recession, the fall in consumption, the deterioration of purchasing power (especially in retirees), the central fact was that inflation plummeted for the first time.
In his first full year of management (2024), the CPI fell from that inherited 211.4% to 117.8% annually. It was the biggest inflationary slowdown in more than 15 years.
Projections for what comes at the end of 2025 reinforce the trend. The latest Market Expectations Survey (REM) of the Central Bank, carried out between October 29 and 31 with 42 participants, including banks, consulting firms and research centers, projects an inflation of 29.6%.
If confirmed, it would be the lowest record since 2017, when during the Macri government the index marked 24.8%.
By 2026, market estimates point to 18.7%. And by 2027, at 10.6%. If the forecast comes true, Milei would end his mandate with the smallest increase in the cost of living in Argentina in more than two decades. It would be the best figure since 2006, when the CPI reached 9.8% annually.
The Milei era: why did inflation in Argentina drop to historic levels?
As Milei always expressed, inflation is a monetary phenomenon: if it is not issued, there is no inflation. Based on that premise, his management applied the harshest fiscal and monetary adjustment in many years, which includes the surplus, spending cuts, and financial “discipline,” as one of the central drivers of the inflationary brake.
In addition, the fall in mass consumption, as a result of the contraction of real wages and retirements, also played a key role in the deceleration of the cost of living index. Without strong demand, prices stop pushing even when costs rise. The pocketbook recession is also an anchor for inflation.
Added to this is the stabilization of the exchange rate, a variable always closely followed by Argentines. With a dollar still at current values (AR $1,470), price dynamics found a more stable reference after years of sudden movements.
Two years after Milei came to power, it cannot be overlooked that the social photo leaves nuances.
Indec reported that in the first half of 2025 poverty fell to 31.6%, a drop of 21.3 percentage points compared to the same period in 2024, when the post-election and transition crisis between Fernández and Milei had taken the indicator to 52.9%. In Milei’s favor, the level of indigence also decreased: from 18.1% to 6.9%.
Another piece of the puzzle is the prosecutor. Last October (latest data available), the National Public Sector recorded a financial surplus of 517,672 million Argentine pesos.
With this result, the Government accumulated in the first ten months of the year a surplus equivalent to 0.5% of GDP and a primary surplus of 1.4%, something that had not been seen for more than a decade.
The fiscal signal was so forceful that, after the electoral victory on October 26 and in the midst of a climate of greater investment confidence, the country risk measured by JP Morgan once again reached levels not seen since January 2025 and moved around 600 basis points, a more than honorable floor for Argentina.
