Economy Minister Luis Caputo flew back to Buenos Aires midweek to begin three days of talks with a technical team from the International Monetary Fund.
Caputo, 59, chose to skip a planned trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and prioritise talks with an IMF technical team over a new financing programme for Argentina.
Argentina has to settle commitments related to its 2018 deal with the IMF, worth around US$44.5 billion.
It is also seeking an additional US$11 billion in fresh funding, which Milei says would allow the nation to remove the so-called ‘cepo,’ strict currency controls that limit access to foreign currency.
Caputo, however, has rejected reports that exchange rate access will be normalised imminently, despite Milei describing currency controls as “aberrant” this week.
A timeframe for a new financing programme has not yet been set, though IMF technicians recently signed off on a recent assessment of Argentina's current programme and policies.
Representatives from the IMF arrived in Buenos Aires this week to begin talks in earnest over a new agreement and have begun meetings with Argentina’s economic team to make progress, government sources confirmed to the Noticias Argentinas news agency.
Midweek, Caputo insisted that the IMF would not set policy, maintaining that “the economic programme will continue to be the one proposed by Argentina.”
Caputo had travelled to the United States with President Javier Milei to participate in US President Trump’s inauguration, but decided to skip the high-profile summit in Davos.
The talks in Buenos Aires come just days after the head of the IMF met Milei in Washington.
After the talks, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva expressed strong support for the government’s economic reforms and confirmed that negotiations over a new programme are underway.
Highlighting “Argentina's remarkable transformation,” Georgieva used a post on her X account to outline Milei’s economic improvements: “deficit eliminated, inflation reduced, and growth recovering with positive prospects for the future,” she wrote.
On Friday, the IMF upgraded its growth projections for Argentina’s economy, forecasting growth of five percent for both 2025 and 2026 – surpassing the global average of 3.3 percent over the same period.
Under Milei, inflation in Argentina dropped 94 percentage points last year from 2023 levels, down to 117.8 percent.
The flip side was the consolidation of a deep recession and an 11-point jump in the poverty index in the first half of 2024, with 52.9 percent of the population considered poor. The release of updated data is scheduled for March, though there are indications the situation improved in the second half of last year.
Argentina is currently repaying a US$44.5-billion loan granted by the IMF in 2018, when Caputo was finance minister in then-president Mauricio Macri’s government and Trump was serving his first term as president in the United States.
– TIMES/AFP/NA
