Hey everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Central Park in New York City. And on the topic of skating on ice, let’s talk about what’s going on in Argentina. They recently, just about a week ago had a new presidential election and they have a new president by the name of Javier mele, who bills himself as a libertarian. Now, before you libertarians get too excited libertarian in Argentina does not mean the same thing that you’re probably thinking of. In fact, nothing politically in Argentina means the same thing that you’re thinking of. Argentina does things its own damn way. And it’s always really weird. So for example, the ruling peroneus are often lumped into the socialist camp leftist camp. But really what they’ve done is they’ve combined that the most counterproductive and self destructive aspects of socialism with some of really, really sloppy version of fascism. So leftist, they are not, they just like to print currency and don’t let that go to your head.
same holds true for Mullah he’s his own thing. And you shouldn’t expect him to fit any pattern. He’s not the Argentine Trump, he’s not anything he’s himself. He’s also never been in government. So he may have some grand ideas about what to come to abolishing the central bank or dollarized in the economy and doing away from the peso. Just keep in mind that he does not have sufficient votes in Parliament to get any of this done without cooperation from the peroneus. So we’re gonna see a lot of loud policies, a lot of attempts to do end runs around the Argentine Congress, and whether it goes anywhere, it’s just early days too soon to know for sure.
It’s gonna have a much bigger splash when it comes to foreign policy in Argentina, like and most countries have the political leader ship has a lot more freedom in dealing with foreign policy than they do with domestic policy. So in the case of Malay, specifically, He
loathes
President Lula of Brazil, who is a more classical, leftist, if you want to use that category. Again, it’s not perfect, but it’s more it’s more fitting for Brazil than it is for Argentina. And so Lula has already announced that he’s not going to be at the inauguration getting the relations off to the best possible foot. And that means that Mercosur which is the common market, the free trade zone of the Southern Cone that involves Brazil, or Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina is basically dead in the water from both an economic and a diplomatic point of view. Oh, hey, I got a visitor
anywho we’re just going to crop him out. Hurt, sorry,
anyway,
or maybe not.
New York, what do you do?
Anyway, this was one of the world’s great trade zones, and it’s basically on ice. Now. Beyond South America, things are also going to get fun because Argentina was just given admission is the perfect alignment. Now, BRICS is an association of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa that has, well, it’s never punched up to its weight, it’s always been kind of an odd grouping. And Malay has made it very clear that he hates all things Chinese. And since China’s Argentina’s largest trading partner, and as the dominant power in the BRICS, this is
colorful, really soon. So the thing you have to keep in mind about all of this is when it comes to Argentina, there can be a lot of smoke without being fire and a lot of noise without anything real happening. But when you apply Argentina’s own penchant for drama to other groups outside the country, who have more
flavor than substance, things like bricks, things like miracles or things can get really crazy really soon, because he’s going to call a spade a spade, and he’s gonna throw a lot of monkey wrenches into the works. Probably the thing that is going to have the biggest single impact is going to be the Mercosur attempt to have a free trade zone with the EU. Now this deal has been under negotiation, how we’re pushing 20 years now, and they believe that they finally have it worked out. Now Lula decided he wanted to get this all shoved through before Millay was inaugurated. But then he flat out asked the Europeans for a multibillion dollar bribe to get it done. So pretty much that trade deal is done too. So if you’re looking at investment into Argentina or Brazil for the foreseeable future, anything that requires value added work and like manufacturing honestly should just kind of write off for the moment because the entire legal framework is going up in smoke right now.