Macaulay 101

The Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies & the Program in International Studies, are pleased to present Matías Vernengo, Full Professor at Bucknell University, for his talk

LA ARGENTINA DE JAVIER MILEI: 10 MONTHS LATER

Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina last November, and was inaugurated later in December, facing an economic crisis that has been ongoing for too long, and that he claims was caused by the Peronist socialist agenda. The deep and persistent crisis explains, to some extent, how Milei, perceived by many as an outsider, rose to power. The truth is that Milei is part of a typical cycle in Argentine society that was referred to as the Argentine pendulum, by Marcelo Diamand, one of the key Structuralist economists from Argentina. For Milei the crisis is essentially caused by populist governments that overspend, and is fiscal in nature. However, the actual roots of the crisis are associated with the external debt in dollars, rather than the domestic debt in pesos, which, in turn, results from deep structural problems exacerbated by neoliberal policies. The likelihood of another external default is substantial.

Matías Vernengo is Full Professor at Bucknell University. He was formerly Senior Research Manager at the Central Bank of Argentina (BCRA), Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Utah, and Assistant Professor at Kalamazoo College and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He has been an external consultant to several United Nations organizations like the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the International Labor Organization (ILO), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). He has seven edited books, two books and more than one hundred and twenty articles published in scientific peer reviewed journals or book chapters. He specializes in macroeconomic issues for developing countries, in particular Latin America, international political economy and the history of economic thought. He is also the emeritus founding co-editor of the Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE), and co-editor in chief of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.