Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…I have some Argentina questions for you. Now, you’ve worked on Argentina. This is late August 2026. Why is it that right now inflation in Argentina is still so hard to bring down? It seems stuck, right? It’s gone down a lot, but it’s not obvious there’s a lot more progress to be had easily. Yes. That’s actually a lesson we learn every time with countries that are in this disinflation process where you’re starting off with inflations of three-digit numbers. Two years ago, I think Argentina’s inflation was around 150%, so coming down to 30 percent, that was tough. Bringing it down is impressive, but it’s always the last mile going from here to anything like a single-digit number, always takes much, much longer. This is nothing special about Argentina. Now, in the case of Argentina, what would it take to bring it down much faster? Firstly, I think there’s got to be a lot more confidence in policy continuity. I think what the Milei administration has done very well compared to the previous administrations is recognize that the problem was fiscal, that as long as Argentina was running the kinds of deficits that they were doing and using monetary financing, basically money printing to pay for it, there was no possibility of getting out of this trap. He has been running primary surpluses since he came to power. He’s absolutely completely committed to it. I remember I had conversations with him when I was at the IMF. This is something he absolutely will not budge from, but there are questions whether the rest of the political class has signed on to this. There’s question marks around that. There are elections coming around. There was a midterm last year. There is a national election in 2027 October. It’s very reasonable for everybody to pause and ask the question whether the reforms will continue or will there be a relapse, as we have seen many, many times in the past in Argentina. Say we knew that either he would be reelected or someone similar would be reelected, would then simple crude monetarism solve the inflation problem, if backed by enough will, or is there still some other thing that makes it hard to bring down the inflation?…

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