UN/BALANCED Episode 9: Argentina's (Lack of) Development, the Promises and Perils of Dollarization, and Pettis on Peronism
Welcome back!
Many of you know of Michael through his work on China, but before he moved to Beijing, he was in New York trading and underwriting Latin American debt. The Volatility Machine—a great book that for reasons I do not understand is now extremely expensive—was informed by those experiences. So it was great to talk with Michael about Argentina’s ongoing financial crisis and new president Javier Milei’s goal of eventually replacing the Argentine peso with the U.S. dollar.
We covered a lot of ground, including the similarities between pre-Peron Argentina and the antebellum American south, development experts’ changing views of Latin America vs. East Asia, why Pettis thinks that Peronist import substitution gets a bad rap, and the political economy of debt forgiveness.
Hope you enjoy! Full edited transcript below the fold.
Remember, subscribers cover our cost of production. Paying listeners get to listen to the full recording and read the full transcript.
Related links:
Argentina and the Limits of Fiscal Space — The Overshoot
The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems — ECLA (Raúl Prebisch)
The Terms of Trade and the Rise of Argentina in the Long Nineteenth Century — Joseph Francis
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