President Javier Milei told business leaders and investors on Wednesday that his budget-slashing “chainsaw” cuts are making ever deeper inroads into Argentina’s government.
Speaking at an event co-organised with the World Economic Forum in Buenos Aires, the outspoken 54-year-old told his audience that the “chainsaw is more on than ever” as he hailed his administration’s public spending cuts.
“Ten months ago, almost 15 million Argentines decided to leave behind the recipes that impoverished our country for more than 100 years in order to apply the ideas of freedom, which are the only ones that guarantee prosperity and progress,” declared Milei.
“We decided to go back to basics. We are correcting the macroeconomic order at all costs. We are building a new Argentina on three pillars: an orderly macroeconomy anchored in fiscal balance, a titanic effort to deregulate the entire economy, and the recovery of the rule of law and compliance with the law,” he added.
“While the rest of the leadership has dedicated itself to clamping down on individual freedoms with disastrous results, we have come to clamp down on the state, once and for all,” through the drastic reduction of public spending, said the La Libertad Avanza leader.
“This Monday we dissolved [the] AFIP [tax bureau], an overcrowded state agency that was used to persecute the private sector, and we created a new tax agency, cutting 34 percent of its structure. We cut spending by cutting the one that collects,” he said with delight.
Boasting of new “investment announcements every day,” Milei highlighted his administration’s ending of money-printing, slowing of inflation and lowering of Argentina’s country risk rating.
“A stable and predictable economy is attractive to investors and consumers. In these 10 months we achieved the first sustained default-free fiscal surplus in the last 123 years in Argentina,” said the President.
“In less than a year we have already achieved the lowest inflation in the last four years, with prices in different sectors that have not moved for months. We have carried out the biggest adjustment in the history of humanity and we have not lost an iota of social support,” he claimed.
Milei delivered his speech a day after his 54th birthday, which he celebrated with a “small toast” at the Casa Rosada and an evening meal with loved ones.
He also found time to do an interview with the Neura streaming platform, during which the President said that the end of Argentina’s complicated system of currency controls – known locally as the “cepo” – is “closer than you think.”
“If you give me money, I'll open it today ... In order to open the cepo without dollars, what you need is for the excess supply of pesos to disappear,” he explained when asked about a timescale.
Macri on Milei ties
Earlier on Tuesday, former president Mauricio Macri spoke about his developing relationship with Milei and the La Libertad Avanza government.
Painting the current administration as a continuation of his own 2015-2019 government, Macri described Milei as an economist with “a special psychology” and said their ties were “slowing growing.”
Mari, who now heads the centre-right PRO party that has backed Milei in Congress, said that his team were collaborating “with generosity” and without “speculation.”
“I still believe in the change that the PRO initiated and that the people have now decided to continue with La Libertad Avanza. We are trying to collaborate with generosity and without speculation,” he said in an interview.
“The people decided this change, this style of the chainsaw, of the mole, of destruction,” he said, emphasising Milei's way of governing.
“Trust with Milei is slowly growing. I don't know if we will end up being what he dreams of, which is an electoral coalition and working together, so that change becomes a reality.”
“I told Javier that nobody gets married nowadays without getting to know each other in depth beforehand, so I asked him to make an effort to get to know each other a little,” he said.
– TIMES/NA/PERFIL
