Argentina Joins Venezuela In The Currency Crisis Club

In interviews, whenever I try to make the case that US policies are leading to the kinds of currency disruptions common in developing countries, I say something like, “For a glimpse of America’s future, take a look at Argentina, where they’re eating cats and dogs because of hyperinflation … wait, no, I meant Venezuela.”

Mixing up countries kind of dilutes the power of the statement, but for some reason, I can’t seem to help it.

That might not be a problem going forward, though, since Argentina seems to be joining Venezuela in the currency crisis club.

To understand what happened we have to go all the way back to the Spanish invasion of the Americas in the 1500s. Conquistadores showed up, enslaved the locals and set up oligarchic systems in which a handful of Spanish families owned pretty much everything, backed up by police states that brutally suppressed dissent.

When Latin American countries eventually kicked the Spanish out they kept their oligarchies.

This massive wealth disparity led to continuous cycles of repressive dictatorships alternating with socialist reform governments bent on equalizing things even at the cost of currency destruction — which of course leads back to dictatorship.

So it’s Spain’s fault but Latin America’s problem.

Now, much more recently – and more disappointingly – two things have happened:

First, Argentines elected Mauricio Macri, a pro-business reformer, as president. He proceeded to liberalize investment rules and invite in foreign capital. This produced some initial growth and encouraged global investors to buy Argentine bonds. Meanwhile, emerging markets, in general, were seeing strong demand from abroad thanks to global growth and rising commodity prices. Developing nations borrowed a lot of US dollars and put the cash to work building infrastructure like roads and power plants designed to make their economies more efficient.

So far so good. But with presidential elections approaching in 2019, Macri fell prey to the temptation to juice growth artificially by ramping up government spending and leaning on the central bank to finance that spending with newly created currency — despite the fact that inflation was already in double-digits.