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Comment by dysoco | Hacker News Reader

Just to clarify, here are some important differences compared to the Trump case:

1. Milei did not sell this as a memecoin at all, unlike Trump, he sold it as a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises".

2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well.

3. 80% of the marketshare was concentrated in just 10 accounts, these accounts made transactions at 0-1 seconds after the president's tweet. There was some clear insider training here.

Was Milei on this or was he just the victim of a scam? In either way he has pictures and met with the coin's creators 3-4 times as the record shows, so he cannot claim he knew nothing about this. I don't personally think he intended to be part of a scam, but it shows some clear incompetence and he cannot promote such things in his official account, scam or not.

I hope this helps people from outside Argentina get another view of Javier Milei, I've read way too many uninformed comments here on Hacker News and other sites about how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.

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> If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.

This is a hasty generalization; while I agree on the fact that Milei was incompetent in promoting a memecoin as a financial instrument, that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden, nor that the things he has done for Argentina are inherently bad, it just means he was incompetent on this matter. I am painfully aware of how divided the country is on the current government and its actions, however that doesn't invite sweeping judgments based on a single event. Criticism should be specific and supported by broader evidence rather than assuming total incompetence from one mistake.

How would he not be? If he did zero due diligence on this and then pitched it to his countrymen as an investment. Incredibly poor judgement no?

And not only as an investment, but as one that can lead to the salvation of the country...

Finance, Dealmaking and Economics are vastly different fields. Just because one is bad at one of them doesn't mean they can't be good at the others.

It's pretty bad, but smart people do stupid things all the time. Hopefully he learns from this mistake. And as pointed out, it does not automatically make all his prior decisions bad - we can actually analyse them each on their individual merit.

>>smart people do stupid things all the time

That may explain it but it does NOT excuse it or the consequences.

Smart people are also supposed to consider the consequences of their actions a bit more deeply than dumb people, and leaders are supposed to surround themselves with even smarter and more broadly experienced advisers to alert them to potential stupid actions and so moderate their actions to avoid harming others (as well as harming their own reputation or standing).

>>Hopefully he learns from this mistake. ...

Right: so just let smart people with a lot of power make whatever mistakes come along that damage others but face zero consequences for them beyond "we hope they learn".

That is an excuse for keeping incompetent autocrats or oligarchs in power, not a plan for a sustainable and growing complex society.

Milei should face whatever consequences apply in his country to any person loudly promoting a fraud with a large platform. But he probably will not, Such a lack of consequences should be recognized as a wrong, not merely dismissed with a shrug.

Sheesh

> Milei should face whatever consequences apply in his country to any person loudly promoting a fraud with a large platform. But he probably will not, Such a lack of consequences should be recognized as a wrong, not merely dismissed with a shrug.

It will probably be dismissed.

The judiciary in Argentina is largely at the beck and call of Milei's political godfather, former president Mauricio Macri, who uses them to put pressure on his political enemies (largely kirchnerismo), and also makes them quietly drop most lawsuits against him or his allies.

Now, to be clear, it's Macri (not Milei) who has the courts in his pocket, and lately they have a strained relationship, because Macri wants better positions in government for his cadres, while Milei is instead poaching them for his own party. So it's very likely this whole mess will be just a way for Macri to remind Milei who's who, and get a few favors, after which the whole thing will go away.

I'd love to be wrong about this, and for Milei to face the music, but I don't think I'm wrong.

Sadly, I don't think you are wrong either.

I mean, there's such a thing as extending the benefit of the doubt too far, tbh. Presuming he wasn't in on it, if he's promoting stuff like this he's likely barely capable of managing his own finances, let alone a country's.

> that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden

Define bad, I'm sure the insiders who made millions selling Libra at the right time don't consider him bad. If he was involved in the scam, it wasn't a bad financial decision from his point of view (just a stupid political decision). Argentinian entrepeneurs don't consider him bad. Those waiting in line at the soup kitchens probably see it differently...

With (a previous to this event) 56% approval rating,

> Those waiting in line at the soup kitchens probably see it differently...

At least half those guys also approve of him. Thanks to his government's policies of reducing inflation and removing middlemen out of social assistance, those people can afford to sustain themselves, and poverty has gone back down to around 37% according to several private economists/universities.

I keep seeing these numbers being thrown around about inflation improving and poverty decreasing in argentina, but then i also read articles about the increasing poverty rates and diminishing of social welfare for the poorest segments of society. I don't live there so I can't say first hand, but this latest move by milei surely made my opinion on him settle on the "not a good guy for the people"

I live in Argentina and you're right.

Milei is not good for the people, and the inflation numbers are highly misleading because the cost in dollars is very high in Argentina right now. Plenty of people losing their jobs, factories closing (some with decades of existence in Argentina), plenty of people begging on the streets.

A lot of people who support him do so out of antiperonist feelings (which has a very strong tradition in Argentina), even as he makes their lives harder or they have to close their businesses due to Milei-induced crises.

>while I agree on the fact that Milei was incompetent in promoting a memecoin as a financial instrument, that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden

Worse. He's a terrible leader. Which is a bad trait for someone who leads a country.

You mean a very active Twitter user who is all about cutting government inefficiency didn't know repercussions of his tweet? It was up for 5 hours. By then damage was done. People with large loses have sued and are getting their money back directly from the scammers. How crazy is this

Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy.

It turns out it doesn't take much to appear to be an economic genius - just stop spending money the government doesn't have and get rid of onerous market regulations (eg. rent controls).

I'm in support of social spending to support those in need, but it's clear Argentina was moving ever-further away from being able to sustain that kind of discretionary spending as a country. They need to get their house in order first.

> stop spending money the government doesn't have

That shows quite the misconception about what "money" actually is.

Not everyone believes in Modern Monetary Theory

Not everyone believes the earth isn't flat either unfortunately.

There's no need to adhere to a particular economic theory (I'm not particularly familiar with MMT) to realize that, at societies scale, money isn't some kind of scarce commodity.

The government spending more money makes money less scarce [0], at any scale (macro, micro etc). That's what we're talking about here.

[0] Unless you believe in MMT

You're moving the goalpost. Here's the original quote:

> stop spending money the government doesn't have

Which has nothing to do with your response.

I interpret "government should stop spending money they don't have" metaphorically as standing in for "don't spend so much money (especially in economically unproductive ways) that it devalues money and misallocates resources so much that it slows down economic growth".

I think simplistic statements "government should not spend money it doesn't have" or "government should stop spending so much money" are all just the normal average person's way of trying to phrase this fundamental economic truth that anyone with a working brain can intuit.

It's obvious that governments cannot just spend any arbitrary large amount of money without consequence.

It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much easier to overspend than to underspend.

So constant calls for governments to go on monetary diets and "make better food choices" are clearly warranted.

> I think simplistic statements "government should not spend money it doesn't have" or "government should stop spending so much money" are all just the normal average person's way of trying to phrase this fundamental economic truth that anyone with a working brain can intuit.

There Is Always a Well-Known Solution to Every Human Problem—Neat, Plausible, and Wrong

> It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much eadier to overspend than to underspend.

You accidentally came up with the best possible illustration for the topic, and it's a really good illustration that actually goes against your argument:

- If you eat too much, you'll get fat and unhealthy.

- If you eat too little, you'll die from starvation.

And you're right, it's exactly the same for government spending: if the government spends too much, it's not good, but if it's spends too little the economy's dead.

Wouldn't an economic indicator for the "right level" be nice? Maintained by some economic research institute (without some obvious agenda)?

Or does that already exist, I just don't know it?

Maybe it's not just one-dimensional though, i.e., it could matter where exactly spending occurs.

There's no such thing as an economic institute without an obvious agenda, and generally no way that we know to compute the optimal spending. And even if there was some way to decide how much to spend, there would still be the insurmountable problem of deciding what to spend this money on.

It's pretty obvious that some uses of money are more useful than others - if the state spent large amounts of money on buying snow and storing it in the sun, that's not going to have the same kind of effect as spending the exact same amount of money on building new roads. But beyond obviously silly examples, no one can really agree on even the basics of the effects of government spending in other areas.

For example, a question like "if the government pays very large pensions and social aids, does that increase the economy as much as spending the same amount of money on subsidizing private business?" is extremely divisive in economic circles - with opposing schools of economics claiming opposite results as the "obvious scientific answer".

Technically there are a few different ways you can potentially eat yourself to death.

Also I'd say the balanced budget "extreme" is more directly analogous to maintaining a balance of calories in versus out, not starvation.

Appreciate your defense of me - that is the point I was trying to make :)

I would go into more depth, but I find there are a lot of people that just fundamentally have different views on economics XD

That's too much of a balanced take though than touted by lots of populists.

Germany put it recently into their constitution that new debt is strictly limited, literally called the "debt brake". That overlooks all the nuances you just explained and in the worst case can cripple the German economy. German politics is full of folks demanding the "black zero", meaning essentially no (new) state debt. It's the literal sense, not the metaphorical sense that you are describing. And people buy it, since that's how their household economy works too. They even have a metaphor for that ("schwäbische hausfrau").

It's terrible. The debt brake is just as bad for their economy as the "rent lid" that's very popular among the German left which is crippling their housing sector.

The worst thing about Germany is how the conservatives have brainwashed their citizens into believing that Hitler came to power “because of high inflation” because they wanted people to forget that Hitler came because of their policies (especially Brüning's deflationary policies). And in the end, with the debt break they just constitutionalized the economic policy that put the Nazi to power, and now unsurprisingly the AfD is booming.

I was answering to “ That shows quite the misconception about what "money" actually is.”

Isn't this kind of statement metaphorical?

The literal thing that happens is your country starts spending a greater and greater proportion of revenue servicing its debt (and eventually defaults), but this is less snappy to say.

That depends to a great extent on how the money is actually spent. The USA spent huge amounts of money to get out of the Great Depression, much, much more than it was spending before, and it ended up in a much better economic position, despite a gigantic war soon after.

I thought the reason the US ended up with a good economy was because of the war, not despite of it[1]. The war massively ramped up the US's industrial output, and unlike many of the other allied powers there was no need to rebuild once the war ended.

[1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...

A war doesn't directly improve the economy. It's spending on industry that was justified by the war (plus national fervor) that helped with this. But building ships and planes and tanks is not fundamentally useful for civilian industry. If the same level of investment had been directed to civilian industries instead of military, the economy would probably have been even higher.

I do agree that the relative value of the US economy shot up directly due to the destruction the war brought to European, Chinese, Japanese, and USSR industry and populations - so if you were discussing things in this sense, I can agree.

I really doubt the technology would've advanced as fast without such an adversarial setting. Economic warfare is child's play vs total war.

All that knowledge and redirected output ended up being extremely profitable once it could be used for civilians instead of the military when the war ended.

So, do you know how that magic money should be spent ? And, if you know, do you know how to elect the right people that will spend it on the right things ? There's a high probability it will be spent on friends' big businesses / fraud and abuse

Sure, but Argentina wasn't doing ING what an MMT theorist would advocate for (which is balancing government spending with available productive capacity). This is evident because they had an out of control inflation rate.

Argentina's economy has been a shit show for a while. And of course outright killing the economy and everybody's standard of living in the process means you're doing something, but it's not what I'd consider helping the economy.

Of course, the first order effect of less spending is not usually good, particulary for those receiving the money.

However, Argentina has runaway second order effects like inflation that must be dealt with, and we know that the only real way to deal with that is to depress the money supply. They will have to deal with the pain in order to repair the rest of the economy; it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long.

> it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long.

There's no rational beyond blind faith here. Inflation will eventually stop, most likely, but thinking that “because of the sacrifice, things will go better in the end” is just magical thinking.

The economy doesn't give a shit about morality, and Germans are paying the price of this belief at this very moment: they put their moral take about debt (“Schuld”, which also means “guilt”) in their Constitution in 2009 and now they are stuck in a recession with no end in sight because the government cannot support their economy, and they also bullied the whole Europe into reducing their debt during the 2010s, which lead to catatonic growth level in the EU for a decade.

When economics policies are decided on a moral basis with religious-inspired arguments it leads to disaster (and it's true no matter what moral values are driving it: Mao starved his population for the exact same reason, even though the moral values that inspired his policies weren't the same).

> Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy.

Installed industrial capacity at its lowest, real cost in USD through the roof, large corporations that have been around for _decades_ shutting down because of a lack of demand, the shutdown of government programs for vaccine distribution and HIV immune therapy, the complete and absolute mismanagement around forest fires, and the lowest spending in science in the past 20 years.

There is not a single metric in which the country is better off. A couple bankers and mining corporations are doing great. For everyone else, the cost of living is unbearably high and productivity low.

Real cost in USD going up because they're releasing the artificial peg that most people can't access anyway?

No one says it's going to be all sunshine and roses, but fixing inflation and housing/rental prices seems like a pretty solid start, as well as moving towards eliminating a currency peg.

If real cost of living in USD is going up, how are they fixing inflation?

Where are you getting that they’re releasing the peg? No market instrument has priced that in and every time it gets raised the Minister of Economy moves the bar for when that will happen. They need a capital injection from the IMF that they will never get because Caputo asked for $45 billion loan for the IMF for the same purpose two presidencies ago and it changed nothing.

You meant utilization not capacity. Your other points are similarly confused.

Argentinians disagree.

"The percentage of Argentines who say their standard of living is getting better (53%) has inched above the majority level for the first time since 2015." https://news.gallup.com/poll/654089/javier-milei-argentina-c...

"Argentina's monthly inflation rate dropped to 2.2% in January, its lowest since mid-2020 after libertarian President Javier Milei took office just over a year ago ushering in austerity measures that have helped stabilize the embattled economy." https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-inflation-r...

Dropped to 2.2% after a 120% inflation in the past years?

Compared to before Milei, costs are completely high and people who could live with their (now considered low) income are barely surviving.

You can say he's fixing it, but at the same time pretty much driving almost the whole population into poverty. And then the next president will have to deal with it and probably undo whatever Milei did. It's unsustainable.

Hey, how much was inflation in 2023 when Milei didn't rule?

> 211.4%

https://apnews.com/article/argentina-inflation-december-annu...

2024?

> 117%

https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/economy/indec-reveals-argent...

Has inflation been high over at least 2 years?

Yes.

Has it gone done by almost half?

Yes.

According to private economists/universities, poverty is around 37%, which is even lower than we he started to rule, we will have to wait for official statistics in March I believe.

I’m sorry but opinion polls I this country are worth the paper they’re written on. Menem’s political program wrecked the Argentinian economy the same way this program is doing and the man got reelected with some of the highest increases in poverty during that period.

The important thing is that outsiders are falsely believing that the problem with this country is high inflation instead of low economic productivity. The country has dealt with high inflation for a century and during that time has the highest standard of living of Latin America and a solid middle class.

What Milei is doing is literally regressing in the public infrastructure needed to develop industry while keeping structural costs artificially high. Mark my words: very little will have been accomplished inflation wise but industrial activity will drop permanently as factories that cannot handle high costs leave.

Poverty statistics are showing an improvement

"However, some described Peronism as a Latin American form of fascism instead."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peronism

What do you want to say with that?

Argentina has an economy that is strongly indexed on USD due to hyperinflation of the Peso and parallel exchanges everywhere ("cambio negro").

What Milei is doing: he's giving up on Argentinian Peso and adopting the USD as de-facto currency.

This is a political move, giving up national sovereignty in exchange of getting Argentina closer to the USA and away from Latin America. It's no coincidence Trump and Elon Musk are praising the Argentinian president.

I know very little about Milei other than a few articles I have read but as someone who has been visiting Argentina on and off for the last 3 years, it does seem to me he has at least stabilized the currency much more than previous admins? I remember the bluerate for dollars being double the previous almost every time I returned and has now stabilized at around 1200 per dollar. I leave no comment on the rest of his policies but that rate of inflation seemed extremely unsustainable so this is no small feat. https://bluedollar.net/ I will admit to being uninformed so if something else is going on here I would like to understand.

Well, that's true, but I think it's based on the economic plan by Caputo.

Argentina is very presidentialist and personalist, so everyone thinks this is Milei's doing, but most of the economic measures are done by people from other political party (PRO), with plans that were in the working for at least 2 years for it's candidates. They have nothing to do with what Milei campaigned with.

The price of the dollar doesn't mean too much, the real cost in USD of living is through the roof and the official inflation index is not reflecting that, what's worse, if your salary is in USD or was tied to USD now you earn even less because they are pegging it so it doesn't go up.

Perhaps he did slow down the inflation a bit, sure, but it's easy to cut government spending when you are basically going into debt with your citizens, not paying government salaries, government contracts, etc. Pretty much everyone in the public scientific or health sector has seen their purchasing power slashed to half, and some of those haven't been paid for a couple of months either.

In 2015 Brazilians could do a lot in Argentina for as low as R$30.

Nowadays, buying food costs almost R$120 ($20 in todays rate).

Inflation can be stable, but cost of living has gone through the roof for almost a decade now, and Milei managed to speedrun it to a point that a lot of Argentinians are below the line of poverty.

Instead, nowadays it's Argentinians that come to Brazil to make a killing at the low prices here.

Your local currency having a crazy valuation after your country just fixed hyperinflation isn't anything new. It's kinda of an obligatory stage. It can get fixed quickly enough if you remove the foreign exchange restrictions.

As always, how the government reacts now to solve all the disparity that high inflation created is what will tell it's a good government or not. The disparities being there right now isn't... But odds are that now his government will terminate before he can do any real work there.

>> how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy

If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue. With heavyweights such as George Selgin endorsing Milei’s performance to date, it’s going to require some very adept use of the reverse gear if things are subsequently judged not to have panned out as planned (which appears to be the typical outcome of other attempts to apply this school of thought throughout history).

The world does seem very accepting of the current increased poverty levels in Argentina - “it’s always been this way”, “it was just under reported before” etc etc. Maybe.

From a purely human point of view I hope they succeed. The timing could be excellent for them, a Return to prosperity given the current global situation wrt world order and demographics could conceivably put Argentina in a very advantageous position economically?

I have grave reservations about the social science called economics though, well specifically “macro economics”. I worry that this experiment just leads to even more suffering.

It's been a very messy experiment - he is limited politically in what he can actually do. As as result it's going to be hard to draw firm conclusions about Austrian economics.

> it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue

It doesn't have to be based in reality. They can just roll out the same argument as "true communism has never been tried", but from the right.

Ultimately Argentina never recovered from the collapse in value of being a food exporter. They're never going to recover until they can sort out the good old balance of payments problem. Doing so is going to be unavoidably uncomfortable as imports get relatively really expensive.

> If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue.

... Not sure about that; it's not like it has had many success stories, and it somehow manages to chug along.

I went through an Austrian School binge during the financial crisis. The Austrian school had some very prescient and relevant observations on price signalling and why orthodox communism would inevitably fail because of it. Basically when you mess with prices, things get out of whack because they're a very basic and powerful signal of all the inputs into any product or service.

But the school is also a spectrum. If you watch interviews with Hayek, he's quite pragmatic in some ways; he concedes that some social programs can be desirable, particularly around heathcare, but pushes that such programs should be as market oriented as possible. He's also fine with taxes on negative externalities, like pollution.

Von Mises, who many consider the father of the movement, was extremely rigid and uncompromising in his classical economics view and how government should be minimal (though being jewish and watching the nazis operate greatly influence this viewpoint). Add to the fact that much of the modern torch has been carried by American advocates who were heavily influenced by Murray Rothbard (who was a student of Mises and can best be described as anarcho-capitalist through and through) and the whole movement has took a nosedive off the crazy tree.

IMO the movement is now mostly made up of people who at best can no longer see the forest for the trees and at worst are bigoted or terrible people who can't stand that "the government" won't let them do terrible things. I've literally seen videos of Rothbard disciples advocate for debtors bondage/slavery, child labour, and even worse things.

> If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue.

just to point it, but he isn't applying much of the Austrian ideas in Argentina. The stuff he ends-up doing tends to be out-right run of the mill monetarism. He didn't do anything new or revolutionary.

Do the Austrian school economists even have ideas that can be applied as a shock, like what you can do in a single year?

> the current increased poverty levels in Argentina

Define "current increased", last data I can find from El País [1] - which is a leftist source - and I have seen repeated in many other outlets - Argentinian and international - is that poverty has seen a sharp decrease in the second half of 2024, and is the same as pre-Milei levels.

[1] https://elpais.com/argentina/2024-12-21/milei-celebra-una-ba...

> 2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well.

As in three days before Trump's inauguration? And then $MELANIA the day before? Yes, absolutely no obvious ethical violation there (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-new-crypto-coin-spar...).

> The companies behind the Trump token, CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC, co-owned by CIC Digital, collectively own 80% of the tokens, meaning that Trump-linked businesses could have gained $8 billion worth of crypto over the weekend.

he sold it as a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises"

Is there any evidence that LIBRA can do that? If not it's even more scammy.

Obviously it's just a memecoin, but that's what Milei's tweet said, he never mentioned "meme" in his tweet unlike Trump.

> Obviously it's just a memecoin, but that's what Milei's tweet said, he never mentioned "meme" in his tweet unlike Trump.

Who gives a shit? Let's stop pretending that utilising the word 'meme' in any sort of associative context is some airtight legal defense against this being a lowest common denominator scam. These are both absolutely illegal and disgusting acts that aim to rob people of their money, using the word meme does not absolve Trump from anything.

https://youtu.be/EqizJTbxAEM?t=3241

One of the co-creators of Libra coin reveals that insiders were able to buy into $TRUMP at $500m at a "special access" private dinner in DC, before it went public. He also reveals he was involved in Melania coin too.

> Who gives a shit?

Nobody really should. This is just to make the scam more obvious to Milei's shrinking supporters.

Milei and his closest circle are now stuck in a loop, trying to argue simultaneously that "$LIBRA and cryptocurrencies are just a gamble, a casino for very technical people", "this only affected a minority of crypto gamblers", and that "he wanted to spread the word about a project that could be good for Argentina".

Anyone with a gram of brain matter can tell these assertions are incompatible.

And yes, one of the co-creators of $LIBRA candidly said the way these things work, only insiders make money, and the rest loses. He claims he's upset by "insider trading" being considered a naughty thing, when it's "the way these things work".

Before anyone asks: I've watched all the interviews, with Milei, his economy minister Caputo, and this Davis guy. Not hearsay, they are literally saying all these things now.

It'll be hard to argue Milei is such a savvy guy now (he often makes a show of calling his opponents "econochantas" -- slang for "econo-fraudsters"). And now he's proven himself to be either a bumbling fool, a scammer, or both. A losing proposition for anyone trying to defend his actions.

>and that cannot be further from the truth sadly.

Okay, so please cite a few more examples of how his economic policies are so terrible in so many ways, particularly compared to the literal decades of economic mismanagement under most of the country's previous governments, and their largess for the sake of garnering supporters.

>If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.

Any leader can make a blunder on something or another, even one managing an otherwise complex but possibly successful economic plan. How about an explanation of how incompetent his government is on other matters instead of asking people to "imagine"?

Given the kinds of policies previous Argentine governments regularly enacted, i'd be willing to forgive something like this, and I'd mistrust the ideology behind your reasoning if you can know about the political history of the country while putting special emphasis on this particular apparent scam.

Uh, let's not do that? You can criticize his policies just fine without talking about what preceded him.

Really? A politician shouldn't be criticized or applauded within the context of the long-running political system that preceded him and just maybe, you know, possibly might have had something to do with his being elected, the choices he makes, and their social effects?

Don't be ridiculous. Decades of abysmal government in Argentina is damn important in any conversation about its current administration.

A lot of words for, let’s remind ourselves, is a head of state endorsing a crypto scam. I’d be far more sympathetic if this was a discussion of something complex like Argentina’s economy. It’s not.

> 80% of the marketshare was concentrated in just 10 accounts, these accounts made transactions at 0-1 seconds after the president's tweet. There was some clear insider training here.

Not ruling it out, but it’s just as possible that there are bots analyzing the X accounts of leaders and other notable people to jump in front of any such actions.

Would simply be a matter of parsing for something that looks like a token address or links to the same. Buck shot some small amount that is sure to balloon when it actually hits. You’ll get burned by scams and account hijacks, but just one payoff would surely cover it all.

> but it’s just as possible that there are bots analyzing the X accounts of leaders and other notable people

Nah. Leaders and other notable people don't go around talking about niche subjects for no reason at all. It's way more likely that whoever made the transaction caused Milei talking about the coin (by whatever means you want to imagine, usually notable people accept money to promote things, but as much as Milei sound stupid enough to think he can do that as president - what is already a crime - I still expect it to be worse).

Also, there is the clear relationship between him and the coin creators.

> usually notable people accept money to promote things

Some businessmen and entrepreneurs (or shady kinds of guys calling themselves so, anyway) are already denouncing Milei (or his close representatives, like his sister Karina, nicknamed "the boss") demanded money in exchange for favors / photo ops / etc. These are guys who have photos with him, not random strangers.

I think there's little doubt Milei is dirty, for all his talk denouncing the "political caste".

Exactly, this was not a memecoin. Agree with your view about Javier Milei.

>I hope this helps people from outside Argentina get another view of Javier Milei, I've read way too many uninformed comments here on Hacker News and other sites about how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.

If relying on multiple clones of his dead dog, that he also named after libertarian philosophers, to give him policy advice as President didnt tip anyone off, I dont think shilling a meme coin rug pull is going to change their minds

I don't think this is the approach if you want people to side against Milei.

His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.

I have no desire if to influence if people side with or against Milei. If you want to follow him, by all means go for it.

I am however, still going to mock obviously bat shit insane ideas, and telepathically speaking with your cloned dogs for policy advice is absolutely bat shit insane

It would be if it was true.

He apparently did clone his dogs but can you point to the source material (in this case Milei) about speaking with them telepathically?

This just sounds super made up.

I've listen to his interview with Lex F. and his WEF speech and he sounded like a principled free market advocate. Not a single thing he said was crazy so I wonder where did you get this factoid.

Milei has certainly been smeared as right-wing so I wouldn't be surprised with other smears as well.

It's not made up.

He's said so in speeches I've listened to. He claims his dog Conan (deceased) gives him advice from the Beyond. You can also google the myriad of interviews with him that mention this (and note: not all of them are critical, some found this touch of craziness endearing!).

He also claims his dogs (all clones of his revered Conan) are his "children", because they are the only "people" -- along with his sister -- "who will not betray him". Note that very few people have seen these dogs alive (very few recent photos or videos), and there's concern they may also be providing him comfort from "the Great Beyond". He gets enraged if people question him about this.

The guy is mentally unstable.

> Milei has certainly been smeared as right-wing so I wouldn't be surprised with other smears as well.

Sadly, in this case the truth is stranger than fiction.

Is this article out of date then? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2024/12/7/a-year-int...

Difficult to confirm but various sources are reporting a steep drop in poverty from the 50s to the 30s over the past year. https://x.com/michaelaarouet/status/1891031131375423725?s=46 https://x.com/bowtiedmara/status/1883202966900900218?s=46

From the article:

> For nearly 40 years, Argentina’s poverty level had consistently hovered above 25 percent. But since the far-right Milei took office on December 10, 2023, that figure has skyrocketed.

When he started, the poverty index was around 40%, not 25%. Then it peaked to almost 55%, but now they claim it has descended to around 40% again (It's probably down, but I'd wait a few months for confirmation.).

Also, from 2007 to 2015 the numbers were heavily cooked, so take that period with a grain of salt.

And in ~1990 we had an hyperinflation, that may skew the average in weird ways.

> But two months ago, their rent mushroomed from 90,000 Argentinian pesos to 150,000 — a leap from roughly $88 to $148. It was beyond their ability to afford.

We had a heavy rent control, so most apartments were out of the market and it was difficult to find one.

For some time it was ilegal to raise the rent and the inflation was 100% yoy. So a contract for two years used to say something like you have to pay an average of AR$75K, but only AR$50K during the first year and AR$100 during the second year. So no "rise", only a weird paying scheme.

Also, to renew it, you must pay the new market rate, but the inflation was 200% yoy instead of the predicted 100% yoy. So the new prize was AR$150K and AR$300K (with an average of AR$225K).

(IIRC there were some changes to allow increments that follow the inflation index, but only every 6 months. With an inflation rate of 250% yoy, that means that every 6 months your rent double overnight.)

So IMO it's not outdated, but the numbers are cherry picked and are difficult to understand if you never lived with a 200% yearly inflation.

> inflation is way down

Inflation is still far higher than it was 15 years ago without contractive policies that are destroying the industrial fabric of the country, and the local understanding of economist that actually know a thing or two is that there is inflationary inertia that will not be solved by the current policies.

> the economy is growing

By no means is the economy growing; industrial capacity is down. The nominal price of goods is going up and the cost of living is going up which appears in some metrics as more money moving in the economy, alebeit for drastically lower production as the real price in US dollars has doubled across every product line. The indexes that show progress use outdated purchasing baskets.

> percentage of poor people is down

Poverty went drastically up at the beginning of his mandate and still has not recovered baseline values. Most poverty indicators continue to undercount the impact of the cost of food, medical insurance and services, which hit poor homes disproportionately. This can be observed by the fact that medicine and food consumption are the categories whose consumption has been hit the hardest.

> salaries are up

Registered salaries using indices that have no accomodated for the changes in inflationary inertia are not very useful. [Consumption, however, is the lowest it's been in 20 years with no sign of recovery](https://www.infobae.com/economia/2025/01/15/el-consumo-masiv...).

> His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.

Do you live in Argentina? Because none of this is actually true.

Look at the other side of the coin, too: his policies are authoritarian, he's dismantling science and industry, he's becoming like a religious leader automatically aligned with the US in whatever random things Trump says (e.g. attempting to leave the WHO just because Trump claimed he would do so).

Lots of poor people begging on the streets for a country where "the percentage of poor people is down". Also, this percentage is compared to the previous administration, which wasn't very good and also went through the COVID pandemic.

He's also been sacking close associates left and right, not exactly a sign of a competent government that inspires confidence.

> salaries are up and so on

This is false, but also, the cost of living is going up. Oh, "inflation" won't show you this, but the actual cost in dollars will.

Great take regarding 1 and 2.

Regarding 3 it seems clear to me that he was not an insider, but he was scammed into spending his political capital and reputation.

As a whole, it's classic cargo cult situation,imitating what a more powerful country is doing without understanding the nuances.

If you as the President get scammed into scamming your people, there should be consequences

Milei's hardcore followers are now in an impossible situation:

- They can continue claiming their all-knowing leader is an "expert" in everything under the sun. But this means he was an insider! And therefore, he committed a crime.

Or,

- They can claim he was duped in the silliest way possible. I mean, $LIBRA had every possible red flag and anyone with half a brain could tell it was a meme coin. So, that must mean Milei is not as intelligent as his closest followers claim.

Also, he, the president of Argentina, claimed he promoted the meme coin because "he wasn't aware of the details". If he wasn't aware of the details, why did he promote it? Will he also promote random miracle cures? Or only if -- as some people are already claiming -- some money is passed under the table?

Or 3: he was ill advised from someone in his close circle, and their head will roll, but I don't see any minister that would take the fall, maybe a kid under the economy minister, either truly responsible or willing scapegoat

> Great take regarding 1 and 2.

lmao, where is the great take?

Regardless of whether this was marketed as as memecoin or a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" they are fundamentally the same thing - a fucking scam. This is equivocal to the amount of effort you would put in to polishing a turd - it doesn't matter as the end result is exactly the same.

What makes it worse is that you'd expect that the Incumbent President of the free world to be held to a higher standard. Not only that, but one of the co-creators of Libra coin has revealed that insiders were able to buy into $TRUMP at $500m at a "special access" private dinner in DC, before it went public. He also reveals he was involved in Melania coin too.

https://youtu.be/EqizJTbxAEM?t=3241

>Regardless of whether this was marketed as as memecoin or a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" they are fundamentally the same thing - a fucking scam.

You lack the gift of nuance, your axiom is crypto=bad, so you are not seeing any difference between what the coin was technically and how it was sold, and that very difference is the basis of fraud.

A "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" would be a completely legitimate enterprise, it implies that whatever money is deposit will go towards that purpose.

I heard the trump thing and it's hearsay for now. They are two different cases, Trump didn't suggest it was an actual investment vehicle, also he did it out of office.

> You lack the gift of nuance

No, I lack patience for obvious bullshit, and to even attempt to defend such an obvious grift is genuinely pathetic.

> Trump didn't suggest it was an actual investment vehicle, also he did it out of office.

Let me paraphrase: "Trump said it was a scam up-front, so therefore he's absolved of any responsibility for it being a scam. Trump announced his scam three days before his SECOND inauguration, therefore there is no conflict of interest or abuse of power."

> he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.

Oh, could he be a lot further from the truth! He could have done at least a couple of orders of magnitude worst with inflation (it was 300% and rising in its peak last year, expected to be 25% this year: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-economy-see...). In the same link, economy is growing/expected at 4.5% this year. The government is at a surplus. The interest rate the state pays on its debt is 29% which looks incredibly high until you see this data: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/interest-rate . Yes, that was a 126% interest when Milei got there. In fact, it is a miracle that Argentina didn't default this year, as they had to do the biggest repay in three years (https://buenosairesherald.com/economics/argentina-pays-us4-3...).

> If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.

This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does", which can't be further from the truth, and is behind some people falling in traps like the sunk cost fallacy ("I can't be wrong about this and cut loses, or people will think I'm wrong about everything"), or insufferable people that double down on their mistakes or enter a train of lies, and would do almost anything except accept they were wrong.

> In the same link, economy is growing/expected at 4.5% this year.

We have had these projections for every government since 2001 that have been sheer conjecture just like in 2017. This means nothing.

> This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does"

Is is obvious that you have never seen the man tweet or be interviewed about anything of substance. He is a sheer, utter moron, who holds a fake doctorate from a degree mill and master's from a third-rate university that is notorious for being singled-out in hiring applications that explicitly exclude its graduates for how bad it is.

I have seen said applications when looking at job boards in the early aughts.

Can you share some link proving that Universidad de Belgrano is a third rate university? I believe it has a good reputation in the country

We don’t really look at publishing metrics here to define what makes a good university; that is mostly determined here by the difficulty and completeness of the programs.

The University of Buenos Aires and a few other national public universities are considered by all to be the most prestigious, along with the private universities of Instituto Di Tella and the ITBA. Lesser national universities rank second along with specific degrees from some private unis. Then you have several tiers of private universities.

The UB looks good externally because it’s the school for rich kids who don’t have the chops for public uni, as such it invests its money in nice facilities and exchange programs, while its research shines by its absence and it’s really not harder than high school even for STEM degrees, due to its ridiculously low bar.

This is highly opinionated obviously because there are no hard metrics but I can more or less confirm this, the University of Belgrano is generally seen as fairly mediocre, even for private university standards.

The University of Buenos Aires is excellent. Is ranked, by the same rank you dismissed in another message, as the 71th place, the number 1 in whole Latin America. You cannot dismiss every University below 71th place as "ridiculously low bar". This is like saying "UBA is shit, because MIT is better".

I know your type: you throw bold assertions left and right, without a single source to back up. When somebody ask for sources you reply "trust me bro". You back up your assertions with "I never met anyone from Belgrano" (I never met anyone from MIT or Harvard, yet I thing they are good Universities) or "there are no famous people from Belgrano"... well, turns out that Milei is very famous and from Belgrano, so your argument falls apart.

But the whole point (Miley is bad because his University is bad) is invalid. You can study at MIT and be mediocre. You can study at a mediocre University and be top notch. Heck, you can even almost fail at high school and be excellent at your work. Dan Luu, University of Wisconsin after nearly failing high school come to mind, or John Carmack (two semesters at University of Misouri before dropping out, after a sentence of one year in a juvenil home). Guess they are bad at their job, according to your standards. Talk about elitism...

You ask from us a full "believe me because I say so, ignore whatever data you might find that contradicts me, I won't explain why nor point you to alternative sources. Just everything that doesn't agree with me is tainted, manipulated, or wrong. And if you don't have a degree in one of the best 100th Universities in the world and I can't find your research, you are unworthy". Nah, I'm not debating in those terms.

PS. Just noticed this:

> [...]considered by all to be the most prestigious, along with the private universities of Instituto Di Tella and the ITBA[...]

Did you know that Milei got his second Master at Instituto Di Tella? Guess he is elite now, by your own standards!

We don't care about in Latin America about first-world instutional ranking metrics that play by the game of publish-or-perish and I don't care about convincing anyone; just ask around in Argentina or ask any academic researcher from the country what the most prestigious institutions are and you'll get a unanimous opinion.

> Did you know that Milei got his second Master at Instituto Di Tella? Guess he is elite now, by your own standards!

He did not _finish_ the master at all. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/cultura/otro-dato-academico-impr...

He is a fraud. His thesis is plagiarized wholesale. He is an absolute moron addled on mood stabilizers as has been said by everyone who knows him.

Just look at him in one of the _very few unscripted interviews he's had_ . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcpAtBNzQEQ

There's a reddit user with your same nick, and 80% of his posts are about criticizing Milei. The passion with which you do that is remarkable.

The day you realize that defunding critical public institutions sets backs countries by decades maybe you’ll get pissed off too.

I'll see the effects in poverty and employment statistics. Then I may understand your perspective.

I consider now that the country was already being set back for decades.

I like seeing statistics, not arguing emotionally.

And yet, he just did the most impressive turn on a economy on the run towards a hyperinflation ever seen.

There are a lot of things I don't like about Milei: this memecoin event is bad, but so is his political friendship with open self declared fascists, him being a libertarian. He is a populist. But about macroeconomics he is doing, at least, good. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge that minimum is simply a hater that doesn't want an honest debate. You can even argue that he did good at macro but bad at micro, and there is a debate. But to call the man "sheer utter moron" in macroeconomics is just wrong.

You are just argueing with the fallacy ad personam: instead of explaining us what policies were moronic, you say "the guy is a moron" and pretend that is enough to have a debate? And then you resort to the fallacy of association: Milei went to this University. I say this University is bad. Then Milei is also bad. Even 20 years after leaving the University and working in innumerable places (among them senior economist at HSBC), or authoring many academic papers. Turns out that https://www.topuniversities.com places the University of Belgrano at 465 best in the world: not impressive, but still of the 132 listed Universities of Latin America Belgrano is ranked the 18th.

If it is third rate and blacklisted, what about the next 114 Universities in the rank?

I don't see his feats as impressive when he was responsible for putting more than half of the population in poverty when he started.

You can look at these numbers and say it's an improvement, but half of the population is still considered poor and the rate at which it's decreasing is not fast enough to consider Milei as a "genius".

That's not true! The poverty rate went from something like 40% to 55%. Now it's back again to 40%. Not good, but not horrific either.

And every economist worth their salt tells you that the number is based on an outdated basket of goods that underweights what has increased in price the most: household services and health care.

Health insurance prices have tripled and household services more than doubled. Basic foodstuffs are now more expensive than they are in developed countries; a pack of pasta is cheaper Costco than a local supermarket.

> And yet, he just did the most impressive turn on a economy on the run towards a hyperinflation ever seen.

This is said by no one except Milei. No serious economist has claimed that we were going towards a hyperinflation. I have lived through hyperinflationary periods and that was not it.

It is _trivial_ to disable inflation if you’re willing to wreck an economy.

I’m sorry I have no intention to reply to this because you’re just making stuff up. Milei has not published a single academic paper and has been credibly accused by many of plagiarism. His h-index is 0. His doctorate is from a degree mill. University metrics are easy to game and about as useful as the Top 50 restaurants in the world. While you’re at it tell me where all those famous academics in UB are, because in years of perusing computer science academia in Argentina I literally never ran into one.

Research Gate lists several publications and two citations:

https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Javier...

And https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/autor?codigo=3854649 , where H=1 (not 0 like your parent says)

He's not a great researcher, because he was not a researcher! He was more of a consultant, and published from time to time until around 2016, when he switched to another type of job.

Yeah, this pretty much shows him up, as either best-case, an idiot (duped by an obvious fraud) or worst-case, part of the fraud himself.

Milei's hardcore followers are still reeling. Either way, they'll have a hard time justifying his actions. His reputation has taken a major hit.

was the coin explicitly sold as a memecoin?

Is it not?

I mean, honestly, I think Milei has a bit more plausible deniability here; he _could_ merely be extremely gullible/incompetent. Trump deliberately fleeced his supporters; it's very hard to read his shitcoin any other way.

Nonsense.

"A few hours ago I posted a tweet, as I have so many other times, supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever," Milei wrote. "I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet)." quote from Milei.

The big problem is that people might (or might not) buy crypto based on tweets. No shadow falls over Milei here, one of the true geniuses of our life time! He has done so much for Argentina, freeing it from socialism, and I won't stop until the last remnants and traces of socialism has been eradicated from the argentine psyche.

Then argentina will rise as a great financial power, built on solid capitalist and libertarian values.

I think there will be a lot of brain drain from the socialist EU to Argentina in a few years time. The question is if Argentina would want to receive the millions of refugees from the EU?

> ...and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly.

Tell me you don't live in Argentina without telling me you live in Argentina.

How are comments like this ("Tell me X without telling me X") helpful? This is such a low-effort reply; at least briefly explain why you disagree with OP.

Why am I being judged by a low effort reply when even OP didn't care to tell us in detail why "Milei helping the economy is far from the truth". Such stupidity should only be answered with another low effort statement. It doesn't care where you are in the political spectrum, objectively Milei is annihilating inflation, we have primary superavit, lowered state expenses among other fantastic things he did for our country and we are doing great, a lot more is needed but we have 3 more years ahead. Saying he's not helping the economy can only be justified by not living here and having no fucking idea how we are doing. I live here, so I can tell you we are doing FAR better than a year ago.

A very partisan statement from you.

In reality, Milei is wrecking our country. Very high cost of living, poor people begging on the streets, inflation kept low at the cost of depressing the economy and wrecking our industry, factories closing down, etc. It's not hard to keep inflation low if you're willing to destroy the country.

And, you know, being involved in crypto-scams. But that's just the cherry on top. Maybe his dead dog Conan told him to do it, or so his medium told him. (Yes, he does speak to his dead dog via a medium, not making this up).

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