Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Trump Admin Responds to Milei’s Failed Libertarian Policies With a US Taxpayer Bailout for Argentina

"We seriously do live in the dumbest fucking timeline." Your



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Related:

From Argentina to the world: Milei’s far-right political impact
"Poverty, lawlessness benefits --- Who is Javier Milei, Argentina’s far-right populist politician?
"Argentina legalises abortion in landmark moment for women's rights
"The Pope Speaks; The GOP Flails
"The Meaning of a Decent Society ROBERT B. REICH""""
[...]
“That’s what I think is the strongest thing about Milei,” said Seman. “His capacity to influence a destructive direction of the state.”
[Why Trump’s Crypto Reserve Plan Has Experts Worried
[...]Insert: Sacks is into Yarvin's idea of decimating governments worldwide - see insert in,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175887492 -
so why would you believe anything he says to allay concerns that Trump's
government might intentionally do the wrong thing with taxpayer dollars.
P - U.S. law enforcement already holds about 200,000 Bitcoin, worth around $17 billion, which has mostly been obtained through criminal seizures. These assets, managed by the U.S. Marshals Service, are typically auctioned to support law enforcement operations and compensate victims of crypto-related crimes. It’s unclear if Trump aims to co-opt those Bitcoins for the reserve, or how the government could go about transferring those funds from Justice to Treasury.
[...]Could a crypto reserve help pay down the U.S. government’s debt?
[...]Cecchetti likened the ploy to a homeowner running up their credit card to gamble in the hopes of paying off their mortgage faster. He also argues that using U.S. debt to buy a large amount of crypto would “increase the likelihood that credit rating agencies would downgrade the U.S., increasing the cost of borrowing.”
P - Meanwhile, some crypto enthusiasts are also concerned about what would happen to Bitcoin if the plan actually works. If Bitcoin increases massively in price and then the U.S. decides to sell off the reserve to pay down its debt, that transaction itself could trigger a significant decrease in Bitcoin’s price.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175891381]
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175901073

Nice. Vance Yarvin, to link to yours - Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas
[...]Dumb or damning it's all still dangerous -- The Ciskei libertarian experiment failed in South Africa. It was an effort to resist
the elimination of Apartheid, on the way to democratic rule in South Africa.
[...]
Related: [...] JD Vance is the handpicked leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=176659607
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Argentine President Javier Milei poses with then-President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago on November 14, 2024.
(Photo: Argentina.gob.ar)

“Milei was already gifted a $42 billion lifeline from the US-controlled IMF and the World Bank,” said one economics writer, “but even that was not enough to stabilize Milei’s crazy Austrian School experiment.”

Stephen Prager
Sep 23, 2025

In his first meeting with a foreign head of state after being reelected president last year, Donald Trump welcomed Argentina’s far-right libertarian President Javier Milei to Mar-a-Lago.

At a lavish gala, Argentina’s president slathered his host with compliments, describing Trump’s return to office as the “greatest political comeback in history.”

RECOMMENDED...

Legislative Elections In The Province Of Buenos Aires
Despite ‘Clear Defeat’ in Key Buenos Aires Election, Argentina’s Milei Pledges to ‘Deepen’ Austerity Measures
https://www.commondreams.org/news/argentina-election-2025

Johnson, Trump
Trump Bid to Block $4.9 Billion With ‘Pocket Rescission’ Blasted as ‘Authoritarianism 101’
https://www.commondreams.org/news/pocket-rescission

Before a crowd of onlookers, Trump would return the favor, telling Milei, “The job you’ve done is incredible. Make Argentina Great Again, you know, MAGA. He’s a MAGA person.”

On Monday, less than a year later, Milei arrived in New York for this week’s meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, begging for help as Argentina’s economy continues its freefall and reels from nearly two years of his radical economic austerity program.

Milei’s fealty to Trump bore fruit. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promised that the nation’s financial department “stands ready to do what is needed within its mandate to support Argentina.”

https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1970107351912075454?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1970107351912075454%7Ctwgr%5Edda9a800000e9a7afb385a8e0acefe7276b5d8d5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Ftrump-bessent-milei-bailout

In what he described as an effort to tame Argentina’s runaway inflation, Milei, who has described himself .. https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2024/03/30/javier-milei-first-anarcho-capitalist-president-of-argentina-a-mix-of-amateurism-and-strategy/ .. as an “anarcho capitalist,” has spent the time since he was elected president in 2023 instituting a brutal regime of what has been referred to as economic “shock therapy.”

His agenda .. https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2024/argentinas-milei-marks-one-year-in-office-heres-how-his-shock-measures-are-reshaping-the-economy/ .. has centered on taking a “chainsaw” to government institutions and worker protections: slashing energy and transportation subsidies, halting public infrastructure projects, declaring war on labor unions, freezing wage and pension increases, and firing tens of thousands of government employees.

[Insert: Milei is a cookie cutter Trumpite.]

The result was predictable: By February 2025, the country had begun to rapidly deindustrialize, unemployment was soaring, and more than half of Argentinians lived in poverty.

However, this did not stop Trump from modeling his economic agenda, often explicitly, after Milei’s—most notably through the exploits of the chainsaw-brandishing billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which he used to lay waste to the administrative state. Trump, meanwhile, has signed legislation gutting social services like Medicaid and food assistance, busted public unions, and canceled numerous green energy and infrastructure contracts.

[OOps, ok, or Trump is a cookie cutter Mileiite. Looks Yarvin
et al got Milei in before Trump's 2nd term.]

The result has likewise been a slump in economic activity, culminating in unemployment numbers critics say the administration has been desperate to bury.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1831784676199219599?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1831784676199219599%7Ctwgr%5Edda9a800000e9a7afb385a8e0acefe7276b5d8d5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Ftrump-bessent-milei-bailout

The US president has already intervened once to help soften Argentina’s landing. As El País notes:

Thanks to Trump’s political support, the government agreed to a $20 billion bailout with the International Monetary Fund last April—to which the country still owes another $40 billion—and achieved a measure of calm, but it lasted barely three months.

Now, with Milei facing mass street protests against his budget cut proposals, a hostile legislature that routinely vetoes his agenda, and a weakening peso in the face of continued uncertainty, he has turned to the US for another bailout, which the US hopes will help ease the country’s economic woes enough to stave off a thrashing for his party in the country’s general legislative elections on October 26.

https://x.com/theserfstv/status/1970313467111551234?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1970313467111551234%7Ctwgr%5Edda9a800000e9a7afb385a8e0acefe7276b5d8d5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Ftrump-bessent-milei-bailout

Referring to Argentina as a “systemically important US ally in Latin America,” [color=red]Bessent said that “all options for stabilization are on the table.” This, he said, “may include, but [is] not limited to, swap lines, direct currency purchases, and purchases of US dollar-denominated government debt from Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund.”[/color]

Notably, Bessent continued to praise Milei’s “support for fiscal discipline and pro-growth reforms.” Despite its catastrophic effects, he described Milei’s chainsaw agenda as “necessary to break Argentina’s long history of decline.”

US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) denounced the bailout as another favor from Trump to one of his political allies.

“First, Trump made us pay higher coffee and beef prices to support a convicted coup-plotter in Brazil,” she said, referring to Trump’s attempt to use harsh tariffs to pressure the Brazilian government into dropping charges against Jair Bolsonaro, who was ultimately convicted last week of attempting to overthrow the government. “Now, he wants American taxpayers to bail out his friend Milei in Argentina.”

(Video: The Geopolitical Economy Report)

But as Benjamin Norton of the Geopolitical Economy Report argues, the motivation goes deeper than simply helping out a friend. It is an effort to save the reputation of “actually existing libertarianism” and the fortunes of US investors who’ve cast their lot with him.

“Milei was already gifted a $42 billion lifeline from the US-controlled IMF and the World Bank (after Argentina already owed more debt to the IMF than any other country), but even that was not enough to stabilize Milei’s crazy Austrian School experiment,” Norton said. “The US government is doing this not only to prop up one of its most loyal puppets in Latin America, but also in order to benefit wealthy US investors who hold Argentine stocks and bonds, and US corporations that want Argentina’s lithium.”

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[The Real Cause of the Crash of 2008 .. grist for the mill .. linked here to "Fault Lines" ..

By John H. Richardson
Jun 8, 2010 at 12:11PM

What if the financial crash of 2008 was really caused by income inequality? Not greedy
bankers, not reckless homeowners, but the ever widening-gulf between the rich and the poor?

And what if the lack of social services — like health care — made things much, much worse?

This is the startling new theory from Raghuram Rajan .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghuram_Rajan , the University of Chicago economist who became famous for standing up at a Federal Reserve meeting in 2005 and warning that Wall Street was out of control and headed for a global crash. As Edmund L. Andrews remembered in a recent post .. http://tiny.cc/k8m5rw .. on the Capital Gains and Games financial blog: "I was there, and I can confirm that Raghu was greeted almost with scorn. As Justin Lahart later remarked in the Wall Street Journal, people reacted as if he were some kind of Luddite. But Raghu was right, and many of his criticisms are now conventional wisdom."

Now Rajan has a new book called Fault Lines .. http://tiny.cc/99m5rw .. that analyzes the structural reasons for the crash, and it's another "aha" moment, especially fascinating because it mixes free-market Chicago School economics with good-government ideas straight out of Obamaland. His thesis is expressed in one of his chapter titles:

Let Them Eat Credit.

This is how he explained it to me in a recent interview. "What I'm trying to say is there's immense pressure emerging from income inequality. Losing jobs is a very, very painful thing, so there's immense pressure to stimulate the economy at that time to bring back jobs because safety net is inadequate, with unemployment benefits lasting only six months and health care that isn't adequate."
[...]
So, to sum up the problem:

"There are three big fault lines — one is rising inequality, which pushes inappropriate spending such as encouraging households to buy houses subsidized by government lending. Second is the inadequate safety net which causes a whole lot of inappropriate stimulus in bad times, and I'd say especially stimulus coming from the Federal Reserve in the form of low interest rates. Third is the fact that many countries have grown in a way that emphasizes exports, which leads to over consumption in countries like the U.S."

For Rajan's detailed and specific answers to all these problems, many of which seem extremely
smart, you'll have to go to the later chapters of Fault Lines. But here's a thumbnail version:

"Let's certainly do reforms in the financial sector, get bankers to own up the risk they're taking and penalize banks that take more risks. But we need to go beyond that, because if we don't fix this underlying source of income equality in the U.S., we're going to have a lot more people falling behind ..."

The popular panacea is the return of manufacturing jobs, which Rajan says will not happen. And trying to ride class resentment to an attack on the superrich isn't the answer either — for all his talk of income inequality, Rajan is still a Chicago School economist who believes that steep hikes in the "marginal" tax rates paid by the rich will stifle innovation. "The people who focus on the Bush tax cuts focus on income inequality at the very top, like the hedge fund guys who make billions. But I'm not so worried about that as the mass of people who can't afford a decent living with a high school education."

Instead, we need to focus on education, which, he admits, implies even
larger underlying social efforts like "fixing communities and fixing families."

"I like to say, 'Let the free market operate when people reach 20 — but before
that, you have to make sure they have the same access to the playing field.'"
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=84338707]
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With Trump having modeled his oligarch-friendly economic agenda on Milei’s, journalist Jacob Silverman—author of the forthcoming book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley—argued that allowing the libertarian radical to twist in the wind is not an option for Trump.

“Javier Milei can’t be allowed to fail,” Silverman said, “because MAGA leaders and the tech right have propped him up as a true libertarian fighting the globalists and ‘doing what needs to be done’: Immiserating his people on behalf of private capital.”

[immiseration
noun
im·?mis·?er·?a·?tion (?)i(m)-?mi-z?-'ra-sh?n
: the act of making miserable
especially : impoverishment
the immiseration of the working class —
C. R. Morris
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/immiseration ]

Stephen Prager
Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-bessent-milei-bailout