Ten days before the ballot, 600 economists from the Political Economy Collective for Argentina (EPPA) signed a petition in which they supported the candidacy of Sergio Massa. Among them are Eduardo Basualdo, Ricardo Aronskind, Noemí Brenta, Mario Rapoport, Alejandro Roffman, Mercedes D’Alessandro, Eduardo Crespo, Andrés Asiain, Julián Zicari, Sergio Chouza, Martín Epstein and Daniel Novak. In the text, they warn about the risks of Javier Milei’s proposals.
“The highly inflationary regimes and hyperinflationary peaks in Argentina began in 1976 with the last civil-military dictatorship. At that time began the era of gigantic external debt, large-scale capital flight and the introduction and expansion of the dollar in different areas of the local economy,” the document begins.
In the letter they highlighted the consequences of the hyperinflation that occurred in the period 1989-1991, its impact on salaries and pensions, and the consequences of the recipe used to get out of that crisis: “The proposal at that time was convertibility, for which one peso was equivalent to one dollar. To have less pressure on the exchange rate and minimize the dollars necessary to carry it out, savings were seized through the ‘Bonex Plan’ and public companies, such as YPF, were privatized to have a greater amount of dollars. When there were no longer public companies to sell, more external debt was resorted to.”
The solution to the collapse of convertibility, the writing asserts, “was not dollarization, as some sectors proposed, but rather the recovery of the national currency and credit, with growth, salary recomposition and macroeconomic order.” Along these lines, the signatories highlighted the Government of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner with the creation of companies, jobs, salary increases, retirements and a period of debt reduction “that was later reversed by (Mauricio) Macri.”
“The limitation generated by the external debt with the IMF that Macri left has greatly conditioned the growth possibilities of the economy during these years. We are aware that it has not yet been possible to reverse the reduction in real wages during the Macri years, but also that the establishment of the dollar as legal tender, as Milei proposes, or the consolidation of a bimonetary economy, would previously imply a megadevaluation that It would pulverize salaries and pensions, and then deindustrialize the country, expanding unemployment and poverty,” the request states. And he concludes: “We support an inclusive development plan, which allows for the generation of employment, an income distribution that grants opportunities to all and a new agreement with the IMF that is consistent and sustainable, as Sergio Massa proposes and began to partially reflect in recent months. harsh and destabilizing. On November 19, 2023, two country models are at stake. The only possible path at this stage to begin to solve Argentina’s problems is through broad national unity with Sergio Massa as president of the Nation.”
Source: Ambito
