It's a different world living in a country like Argentina on an economic scale.
Its currency has weakened 50% versus the USD in the last 12 months. By almost 1,000% in the last 5 years.
Whereas GBP is roughly where it was against the USD 5 years ago. Longer-term depreciations of 50% or more happened over decades.
I hope the reforms are given the time needed to succeed. Countries need stability before they can start to thrive.
Serial devaluation is an addiction rather than a solution to economic difficulties. Its noteworthy that sticking with the Euro has forced a sound money approach to government in Greece, which is now consistently growing well.
Dollarisation is now 25 years old in Ecuador and is generally seen as a success, with 90% support amongst Ecuadorians, despite the loss of sovereignty. Argentina may well go the same way.
Are you saying we should join the euro after all ?
I have always been open to joining the Euro, though getting the rate right is critical.
Sound money and a balanced national budget have always been the bedrock of economic growth. It provides the stability for individuals and companies to invest and plan for the long term.
It is boring and harder to sell to a public than tax cuts or spending inctreases, but Milei has shown it to be possible. He didnt go for growth with tax cuts for the rich, he prioritised a balanced budget, indeed a surplus. That is how he tackled inflation, and a long way from what Truss, Trump, Sunak or Reeves attempted.
Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money were squandered on asylum hotels because of a “failed, chaotic and expensive” system imposed by the Home Office, a committee of MPs has found.
Ministers and officials “neglected” day-to-day management of their asylum accommodation providers even as the cost of the 10-year contracts tripled from £4.5bn to £15.3bn, according to the all-party home affairs committee.
As a result contractors made “excessive” profits at taxpayers’ expense without the Home Office imposing effective penalty clauses or clawbacks.
Government procurement is an expensive mess that turns out to be really poor value for money, whoever would have thought that?
They really need to employ a central team of contracts negotiators and analysts, pay them each £1m salary. It would turn out to be worth every penny.
You'd need to look at performance clauses - monitored by the public accounts committee - this is, after all, the civil service...
The same story has been around for three decades since PFI started.
The supplier underbids for the main contract, but then the government discovers that the scope is much tighter than they thought it was, with all sorts of ways for the supplier to make money on out-of-scope work on an exclusive basis with little oversight. The suppliers run rings around the government in the contract stage, because the government simply don’t have the skills and won’t offer salaries to those that do. It’s like some provincial solicitor being up against a Jason Beer KC.
Speaking of PFI, we’re only a couple of years away from the first wave of Brown’s Skools’n’Ospitals 30-year PFI deals coming to an end, with a load of horrific use clauses and rent increases on their way for the public sector, on buildings that were designed from the outset to have only a 30-year life.
Yes, we've discussed this before. I'd legislate to set the most egregious of these contracts aside, and renegotiate them with prejudice.
It has been going on since the Pyramids. You'd bankrupt Slaughter and May if you legislate (assuming they don't find a wizard way around the legislation). Also there is no protection in law from being an idiot. You sign. You own it.
Brown signed them. They've had two decades of raping the public purse; time to get tough with them.
Javier Milei’s far-right party wins Argentina’s midterm elections The libertarian party won a landslide victory with voters backing Milei’s free-market reforms and deep austerity measures
So is he far-right or libertarian? They are quite different things.
Landslide is rather overdoing it!
LLA have exceeded their target of stopping veto overrides, but do fall short of 50% so will need to rely on the Conservative PRO party in order to pass legislation.
At 41% of the vote for LLA it was at the top end of polling predictions, though not as good as the 55% that Milei got in the second round Presidential election in 2023.
So Milei is in a stronger position for his reforms to go though, but still needs to build allies and relationships outside his party.
Atrention now goes to the Peso/USD rate band.
I think "far-right" is somewhat overdoing it as well.
Indeed in some ways the Peronists are more right wing. Argentinian politics dont map very well to the UK.
Milei has no truck with protection of pensions or for tariffs for example. He is happy to trade with China, where 2/3 of exported beef goes, and now soybeans too.
I don't think the political spectrum is particularly helpful in classifying an eccentric like Milei. He's as much an authoritarian as he is a libertarian, for example.
Also "landslide" is a slightly inaccurate description of getting 41% of the vote (though not as ridiculous as Starmer's "landslide").
And do we have any real indication of how great an effect Trump's $40bn bribe/blackmail might have had on the vote ?
Probably the best result for Argentina's economy - Milei becoming a lame duck, and Trump pulling financial aid would have meant chaos - but harder to say what it means for the future of democracy there.
I don't really see that materially Trump's baillout is a bribe. Any Government giving a baillout would want measures in place to ensure it came with a programme of reforms and cutbacks. Those are Millei's reforms and cutbacks. It was just expressed in a Trumpy way.
Trump stating that aid was contingent on the electorate backing Milei was precisely that.
Why would any Government commit to bailing out a Peronist Government that was going to splash the cash? A no-strings bailout like that would be completely irresponsible. The bailout depended, quite understandably, on the Millei programme being carried out.
It’s Trump, get with the ‘orang man always bad’ PB vibe.
But there are always plenty of PBers to be depended upon for a defence of the ‘orang’ man.
Mr Lammy issued all prison chiefs with a new three-page mandatory list of as many as 30 checks that governors will have to personally oversee before any prisoner can be released.
These include identifying “high-profile” prisoners, about whom governors will consult a new special support unit in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) before they are freed or deported.
Prisons must also check all warrants, including for deportation, are in order; ensure staff who oversee releases are trained to the right grade; and conduct checks with other agencies
However, governors warned it would add to the workloads of already-overstretched staff and questioned whether it would solve a problem that has yet to be identified by any investigation. The new checks could take as long as 45 minutes per prisoner, one source said.
45 minutes doesn’t seem long to ensure the public are safe, and to carry out checks that seem common-sense and that I would expect prison staff to already be routinely carrying out.
I’d argue that 30 mandatory checks that have to be personally overseen by the deputy governor is pretty bureaucratic.
Just make it mandatory for the deputy governor to have satisfied him/herself that it’s the correct prisoner being released and make it a sackable offence if they are wrong…
The checklist approach sounds bureaucratic, but it's proved pretty powerful in terms of stopping human error- see aviation. Does depend on what is in the checklist, of course.
See also reducing the blame/punishment if something does go wrong. One of the reasons for the cover-up culture is the sense that even a small error will get you or your team thrown to the wolves. Cathartic for the public, but overall negative.
I get the sense that this is a second checklist - the governor is going to repeat everything that his team does individually.
Not too surprised Milei's party won the mid term elections. The Buenos Aires provincial results were misleading as large cities always tend to vote more left than the rest of the nation.
Argentine voters have given President Milei a mandate to continue to cut spending and inflation and the size of the state without the legislature vetoing it. Plus to keep US funds from President Trump. He will need to get wage growth up before he runs for re election though
Unexpectedly the Royalists are raging at…..the Mail. According to one of them Andy wouldn’t have turned out to be a raging perv and friend of paedos if he’d been allowed to marry Koo Stark.
Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money were squandered on asylum hotels because of a “failed, chaotic and expensive” system imposed by the Home Office, a committee of MPs has found.
Ministers and officials “neglected” day-to-day management of their asylum accommodation providers even as the cost of the 10-year contracts tripled from £4.5bn to £15.3bn, according to the all-party home affairs committee.
As a result contractors made “excessive” profits at taxpayers’ expense without the Home Office imposing effective penalty clauses or clawbacks.
Government procurement is an expensive mess that turns out to be really poor value for money, whoever would have thought that?
They really need to employ a central team of contracts negotiators and analysts, pay them each £1m salary. It would turn out to be worth every penny.
You'd need to look at performance clauses - monitored by the public accounts committee - this is, after all, the civil service...
The same story has been around for three decades since PFI started.
The supplier underbids for the main contract, but then the government discovers that the scope is much tighter than they thought it was, with all sorts of ways for the supplier to make money on out-of-scope work on an exclusive basis with little oversight. The suppliers run rings around the government in the contract stage, because the government simply don’t have the skills and won’t offer salaries to those that do. It’s like some provincial solicitor being up against a Jason Beer KC.
Speaking of PFI, we’re only a couple of years away from the first wave of Brown’s Skools’n’Ospitals 30-year PFI deals coming to an end, with a load of horrific use clauses and rent increases on their way for the public sector, on buildings that were designed from the outset to have only a 30-year life.
Yes, we've discussed this before. I'd legislate to set the most egregious of these contracts aside, and renegotiate them with prejudice.
It has been going on since the Pyramids. You'd bankrupt Slaughter and May if you legislate (assuming they don't find a wizard way around the legislation). Also there is no protection in law from being an idiot. You sign. You own it.
It’s also much, much older than PFI
The baroque system of Federal Acquisition Regulations was intended as a series of measures to stop people defrauding the government. Which had been going on since Jamestown.
The comic bit is that it is now the foundation of a structure of fraud and bribery. To the point that, in aerospace, the big companies have collectively refused to bid on contracts which are fixed price.
Javier Milei’s far-right party wins Argentina’s midterm elections The libertarian party won a landslide victory with voters backing Milei’s free-market reforms and deep austerity measures
So is he far-right or libertarian? They are quite different things.
Landslide is rather overdoing it!
LLA have exceeded their target of stopping veto overrides, but do fall short of 50% so will need to rely on the Conservative PRO party in order to pass legislation.
At 41% of the vote for LLA it was at the top end of polling predictions, though not as good as the 55% that Milei got in the second round Presidential election in 2023.
So Milei is in a stronger position for his reforms to go though, but still needs to build allies and relationships outside his party.
Atrention now goes to the Peso/USD rate band.
I think "far-right" is somewhat overdoing it as well.
Indeed in some ways the Peronists are more right wing. Argentinian politics dont map very well to the UK.
Milei has no truck with protection of pensions or for tariffs for example. He is happy to trade with China, where 2/3 of exported beef goes, and now soybeans too.
Peron himself was a corporatist nationalist though the opposition Peronists now are leftist.
Milei may be a liberal free trader unlike Trump but then so was Reagan. Otherwise economically Milei is a Thatcherite for low tax and small government.
Milei is also anti abortion so socially conservative on some issues
Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money were squandered on asylum hotels because of a “failed, chaotic and expensive” system imposed by the Home Office, a committee of MPs has found.
Ministers and officials “neglected” day-to-day management of their asylum accommodation providers even as the cost of the 10-year contracts tripled from £4.5bn to £15.3bn, according to the all-party home affairs committee.
As a result contractors made “excessive” profits at taxpayers’ expense without the Home Office imposing effective penalty clauses or clawbacks.
Government procurement is an expensive mess that turns out to be really poor value for money, whoever would have thought that?
They really need to employ a central team of contracts negotiators and analysts, pay them each £1m salary. It would turn out to be worth every penny.
You'd need to look at performance clauses - monitored by the public accounts committee - this is, after all, the civil service...
The same story has been around for three decades since PFI started.
The supplier underbids for the main contract, but then the government discovers that the scope is much tighter than they thought it was, with all sorts of ways for the supplier to make money on out-of-scope work on an exclusive basis with little oversight. The suppliers run rings around the government in the contract stage, because the government simply don’t have the skills and won’t offer salaries to those that do. It’s like some provincial solicitor being up against a Jason Beer KC.
Speaking of PFI, we’re only a couple of years away from the first wave of Brown’s Skools’n’Ospitals 30-year PFI deals coming to an end, with a load of horrific use clauses and rent increases on their way for the public sector, on buildings that were designed from the outset to have only a 30-year life.
Yes, we've discussed this before. I'd legislate to set the most egregious of these contracts aside, and renegotiate them with prejudice.
It has been going on since the Pyramids. You'd bankrupt Slaughter and May if you legislate (assuming they don't find a wizard way around the legislation). Also there is no protection in law from being an idiot. You sign. You own it.
Would love to have been there to see what Pharoh said about Meidum.
Billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money were squandered on asylum hotels because of a “failed, chaotic and expensive” system imposed by the Home Office, a committee of MPs has found.
Ministers and officials “neglected” day-to-day management of their asylum accommodation providers even as the cost of the 10-year contracts tripled from £4.5bn to £15.3bn, according to the all-party home affairs committee.
As a result contractors made “excessive” profits at taxpayers’ expense without the Home Office imposing effective penalty clauses or clawbacks.
Government procurement is an expensive mess that turns out to be really poor value for money, whoever would have thought that?
They really need to employ a central team of contracts negotiators and analysts, pay them each £1m salary. It would turn out to be worth every penny.
You'd need to look at performance clauses - monitored by the public accounts committee - this is, after all, the civil service...
The same story has been around for three decades since PFI started.
The supplier underbids for the main contract, but then the government discovers that the scope is much tighter than they thought it was, with all sorts of ways for the supplier to make money on out-of-scope work on an exclusive basis with little oversight. The suppliers run rings around the government in the contract stage, because the government simply don’t have the skills and won’t offer salaries to those that do. It’s like some provincial solicitor being up against a Jason Beer KC.
Speaking of PFI, we’re only a couple of years away from the first wave of Brown’s Skools’n’Ospitals 30-year PFI deals coming to an end, with a load of horrific use clauses and rent increases on their way for the public sector, on buildings that were designed from the outset to have only a 30-year life.
Yes, we've discussed this before. I'd legislate to set the most egregious of these contracts aside, and renegotiate them with prejudice.
It has been going on since the Pyramids. You'd bankrupt Slaughter and May if you legislate (assuming they don't find a wizard way around the legislation). Also there is no protection in law from being an idiot. You sign. You own it.
It’s also much, much older than PFI
The baroque system of Federal Acquisition Regulations was intended as a series of measures to stop people defrauding the government. Which had been going on since Jamestown.
The comic bit is that it is now the foundation of a structure of fraud and bribery. To the point that, in aerospace, the big companies have collectively refused to bid on contracts which are fixed price.
The US space industry didn’t consider some crazy billionaire just building the damn rocket, and cleaning up the vast majority of the routine stuff-to-orbit work.
Comments
NEW THREAD
Sound money and a balanced national budget have always been the bedrock of economic growth. It provides the stability for individuals and companies to invest and plan for the long term.
It is boring and harder to sell to a public than tax cuts or spending inctreases, but Milei has shown it to be possible. He didnt go for growth with tax cuts for the rich, he prioritised a balanced budget, indeed a surplus. That is how he tackled inflation, and a long way from what Truss, Trump, Sunak or Reeves attempted.
They've had two decades of raping the public purse; time to get tough with them.
Make him responsible for his team’s performance
Argentine voters have given President Milei a mandate to continue to cut spending and inflation and the size of the state without the legislature vetoing it. Plus to keep US funds from President Trump. He will need to get wage growth up before he runs for re election though
The baroque system of Federal Acquisition Regulations was intended as a series of measures to stop people defrauding the government. Which had been going on since Jamestown.
The comic bit is that it is now the foundation of a structure of fraud and bribery. To the point that, in aerospace, the big companies have collectively refused to bid on contracts which are fixed price.
Milei may be a liberal free trader unlike Trump but then so was Reagan. Otherwise economically Milei is a Thatcherite for low tax and small government.
Milei is also anti abortion so socially conservative on some issues
“Lessons will be learned”?