https://apnews.com/article/milei-argentina-president-privatization-1a87d02035511982ab620104b9feb255
Argentina’s president-elect has given the first signals of how he plans to shake up South America’s second-largest economy.
Argentina will collapse from the weight of privatization. The civilians will be unable to afford water and energy in 5 years. If they thought inflation was bad before the crony handed everything to the oligarchs....
Milei predicted it would take him up to half of his presidential term — “between 18 and 24 months” — to decrease inflation, which polls showed was the biggest concern for Argentine voters as consumer prices have increased 140% over the past year.
[Just give me two years to completely dismantle the government and hand everything over to my oligarch buddies; let's just be patient and see how it works out.]
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The decisiveness of the victory — a doubt until yesterday — allows him to signal to all parties who is in control of the transition and the formation of the Cabinet,” said Mariano Machado, principal analyst for the Americas at Verisk Maplecroft, a global risk intelligence firm.
He said he still wanted to close the Central Bank of Argentina, calling it “a moral decision,” but appeared to put his plans for replacing the local currency, the peso, with the U.S. dollar on the back burner.
Milei predicted it would take him up to half of his presidential term — “between 18 and 24 months” — to decrease inflation, which polls showed was the biggest concern for Argentine voters as consumer prices have increased 140% over the past year.
Milei’s privatization plans “in large part clash with the Argentine constitutional model,” warned Andrés Gil Domínguez, a law professor at the University of Buenos Aires.
Although support for his policies would increase if he allies himself with members of the main center-right opposition coalition, which backed his candidacy in the second round, “they don’t have a sufficient number to be able to impose things,” Mariel Fornoni, of the political consulting firm Management & Fit, said.
“In this scenario, the issue will surely be litigated with an uncertain outcome,” explained Gustavo Arballo, a law professor at the La Pampa National University.
The original article contains 867 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
And he knows just the people to run those companies! After all, he's a transactional kinda guy.
Not a bad idea if the government would intervene whenever needed. But I doubt Argentina’s government will intervene.
Public companies like water services aren't trying to charge you as much as possible. Private companies like ISPs are trying to charge you as much as possible.
Why would you want public companies taken private?
Greed. I remember Thatcher selling off public utilities. If you had money you could buy into the IPO and make absolute bank in the short term. If you didn't have any spare cash, fuck you for being poor, and the wealth gap increases.
In the long term, those that got paid by buying shares in these new companies got shafted along with every one else as prices increased, quality of services declined and enshittification set in.
That and the rivers and coasts being so full of shit you can't swim in them any more without getting sick.
Oh, old people dying because they can't afford to heat their homes in winter too.
I don't understand why Tory MP's heads aren't in spikes outside Parliament as a warning to others.
The problem is the nature of such companies. Some companies can easily be replicated and have plenty competition. However, states usually own infrastructure which can’t just be built three times by different companies to compete. So someone ends up simply having a regional monopoly and jacking up prices.
Now. I will not deny that it appears like radical reform is needed, spending must be cut, and state companies are always expensive affairs. I’ve just done a quick search on Wikipedia for big Argentinian companies, and the state owns several banks and airlines. Clearly some of those could be privatised, as financial services and airlines more easily can compete than for example water utilities or power grid operators.
The whole dolarisation of the economy is hardly sound even if it tries to circumvent the existence of weak institutions in Argentina by transferring trust to the Fed, although the lack of control over their currency means that they’re at the whim of US monetary policy