Argentina's Javier Milei – what are his plans and will they work?

“Anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei has taken power in Argentina with radical plans to oust the political class and enact sweeping economic reforms. Will it work?

President of Argentina Javier Milei arrives to the Colon Theater for a gala event on December 10 2023 in Buenos Aires Argentina Photo by Marcelo EndelliGetty Images
(Image credit: Marcelo Endelli/Getty Images)

Argentina's annual inflation is above 140% and is expected to hit 200% within months. Four in ten people are living in poverty. The value of the peso has collapsed by more than 90% against the US dollar in the past four years, while dollar bonds trade at less than 33% of their par value. A bewildering assortment of different exchange rates – as well as complex controls on capital, prices, imports and exports – have crippled investment. And public debt has soared to 90% of GDP.

In an effort to prevent collapse, the outgoing Peronist government (the left-nationalist party that has dominated Argentinian politics for decades) resorted to ever more money-printing, fuelling the inflationary spiral and putting off the day of reckoning. 

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.