Just to clarify, here are some important differences compared to the Trump case:
1. Milei did not sell this as a memecoin at all, unlike Trump, he sold it as a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises".
2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well.
3. 80% of the marketshare was concentrated in just 10 accounts, these accounts made transactions at 0-1 seconds after the president's tweet. There was some clear insider training here.
Was Milei on this or was he just the victim of a scam? In either way he has pictures and met with the coin's creators 3-4 times as the record shows, so he cannot claim he knew nothing about this. I don't personally think he intended to be part of a scam, but it shows some clear incompetence and he cannot promote such things in his official account, scam or not.
I hope this helps people from outside Argentina get another view of Javier Milei, I've read way too many uninformed comments here on Hacker News and other sites about how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
> If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
This is a hasty generalization; while I agree on the fact that Milei was incompetent in promoting a memecoin as a financial instrument, that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden, nor that the things he has done for Argentina are inherently bad, it just means he was incompetent on this matter. I am painfully aware of how divided the country is on the current government and its actions, however that doesn't invite sweeping judgments based on a single event. Criticism should be specific and supported by broader evidence rather than assuming total incompetence from one mistake.
>while I agree on the fact that Milei was incompetent in promoting a memecoin as a financial instrument, that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden
Worse. He's a terrible leader. Which is a bad trait for someone who leads a country.
You mean a very active Twitter user who is all about cutting government inefficiency didn't know repercussions of his tweet? It was up for 5 hours. By then damage was done. People with large loses have sued and are getting their money back directly from the scammers. How crazy is this
> that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden
Define bad, I'm sure the insiders who made millions selling Libra at the right time don't consider him bad. If he was involved in the scam, it wasn't a bad financial decision from his point of view (just a stupid political decision). Argentinian entrepeneurs don't consider him bad. Those waiting in line at the soup kitchens probably see it differently...
I mean, there's such a thing as extending the benefit of the doubt too far, tbh. Presuming he wasn't in on it, if he's promoting stuff like this he's likely barely capable of managing his own finances, let alone a country's.
Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy.
It turns out it doesn't take much to appear to be an economic genius - just stop spending money the government doesn't have and get rid of onerous market regulations (eg. rent controls).
I'm in support of social spending to support those in need, but it's clear Argentina was moving ever-further away from being able to sustain that kind of discretionary spending as a country. They need to get their house in order first.
> Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy.
Installed industrial capacity at its lowest, real cost in USD through the roof, large corporations that have been around for _decades_ shutting down because of a lack of demand, the shutdown of government programs for vaccine distribution and HIV immune therapy, the complete and absolute mismanagement around forest fires, and the lowest spending in science in the past 20 years.
There is not a single metric in which the country is better off. A couple bankers and mining corporations are doing great. For everyone else, the cost of living is unbearably high and productivity low.
Argentina has an economy that is strongly indexed on USD due to hyperinflation of the Peso and parallel exchanges everywhere ("cambio negro").
What Milei is doing: he's giving up on Argentinian Peso and adopting the USD as de-facto currency.
This is a political move, giving up national sovereignty in exchange of getting Argentina closer to the USA and away from Latin America. It's no coincidence Trump and Elon Musk are praising the Argentinian president.
I know very little about Milei other than a few articles I have read but as someone who has been visiting Argentina on and off for the last 3 years, it does seem to me he has at least stabilized the currency much more than previous admins? I remember the bluerate for dollars being double the previous almost every time I returned and has now stabilized at around 1200 per dollar. I leave no comment on the rest of his policies but that rate of inflation seemed extremely unsustainable so this is no small feat. https://bluedollar.net/
I will admit to being uninformed so if something else is going on here I would like to understand.
The price of the dollar doesn't mean too much, the real cost in USD of living is through the roof and the official inflation index is not reflecting that, what's worse, if your salary is in USD or was tied to USD now you earn even less because they are pegging it so it doesn't go up.
Perhaps he did slow down the inflation a bit, sure, but it's easy to cut government spending when you are basically going into debt with your citizens, not paying government salaries, government contracts, etc. Pretty much everyone in the public scientific or health sector has seen their purchasing power slashed to half, and some of those haven't been paid for a couple of months either.
In 2015 Brazilians could do a lot in Argentina for as low as R$30.
Nowadays, buying food costs almost R$120 ($20 in todays rate).
Inflation can be stable, but cost of living has gone through the roof for almost a decade now, and Milei managed to speedrun it to a point that a lot of Argentinians are below the line of poverty.
Well, that's true, but I think it's based on the economic plan by Caputo.
Argentina is very presidentialist and personalist, so everyone thinks this is Milei's doing, but most of the economic measures are done by people from other political party (PRO), with plans that were in the working for at least 2 years for it's candidates. They have nothing to do with what Milei campaigned with.
>> how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy
If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue. With heavyweights such as George Selgin endorsing Milei’s performance to date, it’s going to require some very adept use of the reverse gear if things are subsequently judged not to have panned out as planned (which appears to be the typical outcome of other attempts to apply this school of thought throughout history).
The world does seem very accepting of the current increased poverty levels in Argentina - “it’s always been this way”, “it was just under reported before” etc etc. Maybe.
From a purely human point of view I hope they succeed. The timing could be excellent for them, a Return to prosperity given the current global situation wrt world order and demographics could conceivably put Argentina in a very advantageous position economically?
I have grave reservations about the social science called economics though, well specifically “macro economics”. I worry that this experiment just leads to even more suffering.
> If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue.
just to point it, but he isn't applying much of the Austrian ideas in Argentina. The stuff he ends-up doing tends to be out-right run of the mill monetarism. He didn't do anything new or revolutionary.
Do the Austrian school economists even have ideas that can be applied as a shock, like what you can do in a single year?
> it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue
It doesn't have to be based in reality. They can just roll out the same argument as "true communism has never been tried", but from the right.
Ultimately Argentina never recovered from the collapse in value of being a food exporter. They're never going to recover until they can sort out the good old balance of payments problem. Doing so is going to be unavoidably uncomfortable as imports get relatively really expensive.
It's been a very messy experiment - he is limited politically in what he can actually do. As as result it's going to be hard to draw firm conclusions about Austrian economics.
> the current increased poverty levels in Argentina
Define "current increased", last data I can find from El País [1] - which is a leftist source - and I have seen repeated in many other outlets - Argentinian and international - is that poverty has seen a sharp decrease in the second half of 2024, and is the same as pre-Milei levels.
> 2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well.
> The companies behind the Trump token, CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC, co-owned by CIC Digital, collectively own 80% of the tokens, meaning that Trump-linked businesses could have gained $8 billion worth of crypto over the weekend.
Okay, so please cite a few more examples of how his economic policies are so terrible in so many ways, particularly compared to the literal decades of economic mismanagement under most of the country's previous governments, and their largess for the sake of garnering supporters.
>If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
Any leader can make a blunder on something or another, even one managing an otherwise complex but possibly successful economic plan. How about an explanation of how incompetent his government is on other matters instead of asking people to "imagine"?
Given the kinds of policies previous Argentine governments regularly enacted, i'd be willing to forgive something like this, and I'd mistrust the ideology behind your reasoning if you can know about the political history of the country while putting special emphasis on this particular apparent scam.
> 80% of the marketshare was concentrated in just 10 accounts, these accounts made transactions at 0-1 seconds after the president's tweet. There was some clear insider training here.
Not ruling it out, but it’s just as possible that there are bots analyzing the X accounts of leaders and other notable people to jump in front of any such actions.
Would simply be a matter of parsing for something that looks like a token address or links to the same. Buck shot some small amount that is sure to balloon when it actually hits. You’ll get burned by scams and account hijacks, but just one payoff would surely cover it all.
> but it’s just as possible that there are bots analyzing the X accounts of leaders and other notable people
Nah. Leaders and other notable people don't go around talking about niche subjects for no reason at all. It's way more likely that whoever made the transaction caused Milei talking about the coin (by whatever means you want to imagine, usually notable people accept money to promote things, but as much as Milei sound stupid enough to think he can do that as president - what is already a crime - I still expect it to be worse).
Also, there is the clear relationship between him and the coin creators.
>I hope this helps people from outside Argentina get another view of Javier Milei, I've read way too many uninformed comments here on Hacker News and other sites about how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
If relying on multiple clones of his dead dog, that he also named after libertarian philosophers, to give him policy advice as President didnt tip anyone off, I dont think shilling a meme coin rug pull is going to change their minds
I don't think this is the approach if you want people to side against Milei.
His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.
Milei's hardcore followers are now in an impossible situation:
- They can continue claiming their all-knowing leader is an "expert" in everything under the sun. But this means he was an insider! And therefore, he committed a crime.
Or,
- They can claim he was duped in the silliest way possible. I mean, $LIBRA had every possible red flag and anyone with half a brain could tell it was a meme coin. So, that must mean Milei is not as intelligent as his closest followers claim.
Also, he, the president of Argentina, claimed he promoted the meme coin because "he wasn't aware of the details". If he wasn't aware of the details, why did he promote it? Will he also promote random miracle cures? Or only if -- as some people are already claiming -- some money is passed under the table?
Regardless of whether this was marketed as as memecoin or a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" they are fundamentally the same thing - a fucking scam. This is equivocal to the amount of effort you would put in to polishing a turd - it doesn't matter as the end result is exactly the same.
What makes it worse is that you'd expect that the Incumbent President of the free world to be held to a higher standard. Not only that, but one of the co-creators of Libra coin has revealed that insiders were able to buy into $TRUMP at $500m at a "special access" private dinner in DC, before it went public. He also reveals he was involved in Melania coin too.
> he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
Oh, could he be a lot further from the truth! He could have done at least a couple of orders of magnitude worst with inflation (it was 300% and rising in its peak last year, expected to be 25% this year: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-economy-see...). In the same link, economy is growing/expected at 4.5% this year. The government is at a surplus. The interest rate the state pays on its debt is 29% which looks incredibly high until you see this data: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/interest-rate . Yes, that was a 126% interest when Milei got there. In fact, it is a miracle that Argentina didn't default this year, as they had to do the biggest repay in three years (https://buenosairesherald.com/economics/argentina-pays-us4-3...).
> If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does", which can't be further from the truth, and is behind some people falling in traps like the sunk cost fallacy ("I can't be wrong about this and cut loses, or people will think I'm wrong about everything"), or insufferable people that double down on their mistakes or enter a train of lies, and would do almost anything except accept they were wrong.
> In the same link, economy is growing/expected at 4.5% this year.
We have had these projections for every government since 2001 that have been sheer conjecture just like in 2017. This means nothing.
> This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does"
Is is obvious that you have never seen the man tweet or be interviewed about anything of substance. He is a sheer, utter moron, who holds a fake doctorate from a degree mill and master's from a third-rate university that is notorious for being singled-out in hiring applications that explicitly exclude its graduates for how bad it is.
I have seen said applications when looking at job boards in the early aughts.
I mean, honestly, I think Milei has a bit more plausible deniability here; he _could_ merely be extremely gullible/incompetent. Trump deliberately fleeced his supporters; it's very hard to read his shitcoin any other way.
"A few hours ago I posted a tweet, as I have so many other times, supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever," Milei wrote. "I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet)." quote from Milei.
The big problem is that people might (or might not) buy crypto based on tweets. No shadow falls over Milei here, one of the true geniuses of our life time! He has done so much for Argentina, freeing it from socialism, and I won't stop until the last remnants and traces of socialism has been eradicated from the argentine psyche.
Then argentina will rise as a great financial power, built on solid capitalist and libertarian values.
I think there will be a lot of brain drain from the socialist EU to Argentina in a few years time. The question is if Argentina would want to receive the millions of refugees from the EU?
How are comments like this ("Tell me X without telling me X") helpful? This is such a low-effort reply; at least briefly explain why you disagree with OP.
The Solana trenches are effectively a giant crime-riddled casino. Everyone who plays understands this -- you can make money but you're essentially gambling. I'm not saying this is OK, but it's the current state of things.
When this $Libra token launched, everything else dumped as capital flowed into it, and then effectively got siphoned off by insiders. So even people that didn't chase "Argentina's coin" got screwed. Rinse, lather, repeat. There are some winners in this game, mostly insiders and cabals, but a whole bunch of losers.
I would say something's gotta give, but the stark reality is that America's casinos are always jampacked with dream chasers.
I was at an (academic!) conference about Crypto recently with a friend. I am an outsider to the whole topic and wanted to "expand my horizon" and see if maybe my expectations of if it being mostly a scam were wrong.
In one of the first talks we went to, the panel speaker mentioned that Trump pumping-and-dumping his memecoin was a good thing, because that more or less justifies their own position in doing so, and that it would maybe lower their legal fees in the future. This was followed by a big laugh from the audience.
If you know the rules of the game and you willingly participate, then how is it different from any casino?
I don't buy into any of the people that claim they were scammed, they knew the rules and they tried to make money out of nothing. Other than perhaps trading unregulated securities, I don't see the actual fraud.
To be clear it is distinct from pretending to be a security for an actual productive company, that is actual fraud, but usually the coins are very transparent about having no underlying value.
> If you know the rules of the game and you willingly participate, then how is it different from any casino?
If _everyone_ playing the game knew the rules, no-one would play. Like all fraudulent schemes, these are fundamentally dependent on getting in new marks.
These memecoins are essentially partially open Ponzi schemes; there are the organisers (occupying essentially the Charles Ponzi role), the naive marks (occupying the same role as the marks in a conventional Ponzi scheme), but in the middle you have the gamblers, the people who are _aware_ that it's a fraud, but also aware that if they get in at the right time they can take some money off the marks and the gamblers who misjudge their time of entry.
(To _some_ extent this dynamic exists in some conventional Ponzi and pyramid schemes; "this is obviously a fraud, but if I get in early I might be one of the winners" is a game that has been played before. Meme coins have really turned it up to 11 tho)
Neither do many of the people who say such a thing here. Instead they regurgitate classic HN talking points around crypto without really considering their logic.
Simple example: calling something like bitcoin a "ponzi scheme" when it's literally run by nobody in particular and has no specific fraudulent promotion being done by its administrators (since there are none) for the sake of personal gain through redirected funds.
Is there such a thing as truly "unregulated" here? What I mean is - pyramid schemes are illegal irrespective of the mechanism, so there's always _some_ basic regulation for these things.
I feel pyramid schemes are just a special kind of pump-and-dump scheme, and I don't understand how these aren't being punished effectively and swiftly by the existing laws and enforcement agencies...
> the company informed him about the Libra blockchain project and its aims to finance private ventures in the country.
I can’t believe people are still falling for these claims. Every single time someone launches a coin with claims that purchasing it will help fund some special cause, there is no basis to the claim.
If you want to fund or finance a cause, give your money to that cause. If you buy a meme coin, you’re only giving your money to insiders who held the coins before the pump.
But of course the motivator wasn't actually to "finance private ventures", it was to rent seek and to speculate about making profit by being first to be in on the thing.
The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but I couldn't help myself. It's my character."
Let's see it another way: there's absolutely no way that in the 2-3 hours the post was up a person not familiar with the gamblecoin ecosystem could purchase $LIBRA, let alone pour thousands of dollars in. The people who lost money are all professional memecoin gamblers, and the ones who pocketed in are obviously connected to the project leaders. Cyptobros want to have unlimited freedom to trade whatever they want without regulation, which is fine for me, but then they shouldn't whine when/if they are rug-pulled.
For all the outrage, I yet have to see a single person in Argentina produce a TXHASH that proves they put money on the project. This is not something you can just log in on Binance and buy with cash in a single click. Meanwhile, states operate their own lotteries and casinos (e.g. "Lotería de la Provincia") where the poor and hopeful go to pay a tax on their ignorance.
Of course, the president and his advisors are responsible for not investigating enough and blindly trusting these so-called "businessmen". We'll see what the Law has to say about that, but I remind you that Argentina is a place where a vice-president tried to steal a company (look up Ciccone Calcográfica).
Last, the 4.4B number looks huge, but that is just "market cap", i.e. valuation extrapolated to the total supply of tokens, and not the actual amount of money that went into the coin.
> For all the outrage, I yet have to see a single person in Argentina produce a TXHASH that proves they put money on the project.
Normally people here (arg) don't follow politicians they don't like on X. It's probable that most argentines that put in any money were his own followers. Among those, there were very well known influencers that actually did complain about the whole issue saying they lost money but they later deleted their posts (Fran Fijap, for example). I agree that a very sizeable portion of people that "invested" seem to be foreigners, though.
Milei's governmental structure is a very vertical one, they even expect para-official influencers to not criticize anything the government does.
In fact, people who criticize Milei or deviate from what he considers the norm, however mildly, get thrown out of government (see: Ramiro Marra). He has a troll farm run by influencers who will ostracize anyone who criticizes Milei. It's very likely Fran Fijap was told by them to delete his post "or else"...
The point is the window to buy was 2-3 hours: you had to be ready to trade, and watching either charts or being on a discord or actively checking X and with cash in an account.
People lost money but I doubt there was much collateral damage
No, it's not OK, but I also don't think a president has any responsibility towards gamblers in the US or China. Also, "I invested because the president of a random country told me so" is a pretty bad excuse for losing money.
This reminded me of WorldCoin and it was sad to see it's still trading 0.01 above its all time low. I had expected it to go much much down further.
My introduction to it was at a local mall here. A person just approached and me and I politely said "I don't want it" assuming it was the credit cards or donations and he chuckled and said "sir, it's not credit cards" but I kept moving and then he pointed me to that creepy looking shiny globe/round thing. The moment I saw "Sam Altman" mentioned on a print-out kept there, I couldn't run faster out of there. I later read about it and found out this time around the creepy bugger was out scanning everyone's iris.
I think there are many types of scams after all. Good scam, bad scam, legit scam, illegitimate scam et cetera.
Wild story. This is more perverse than rugpulls (i.e., $libra).
I'd blame the bank staff just as much as the CEO. No controls, signing off on wire transfers above material thresholds...I assume that Board and bank officers will get reamed for gross negligence and willful misconduct. Those can pierce liability caps and insurance.
I seem to be in the minority here, and I would definitely be framed as a supporter for saying this, but I'm a nuanced person.
He is more of an idiot than a scammer, legally I think the term is negligence instead of fraud. Having recognized that he caused damage by negligence, additionally I think he was a victim too, he was scammed out of political capital and reputation. I don't think he was in on it, although definitely someone near him definitely was, not necessarily a dev, but definitely someone with a "bag", holding it and speculating that it would go up, essentially utilizing their position for personal gain, which I think is a very classic form of corruption.
It's not the minister of economy, it's not his modus operandi (Funds and offshore accounts), this has the markings of someone young. Whatever he got out of it, either by buying early and holding, or by founding it himself, he for sure lost of all of his political capital.
I'll take a look at the specific contract, and addresses, I'm assuming it's a basic pump.fun thing, but there may be more to it.
I dont know which scenario is worse for a president, an experienced economist like him not understanding what he was endorsing or being part of the scam.
He is not an experienced economist. He holds a Master's from a third-rate private university and a doctorate from a degree mill. This myth needs to die.
This would imply he got nothing out of it or even lost money and I highly doubt it because if he lost money he have have instantly sent out the police and justice department until he was made whole. The truth is this is plain corruption but instead of making millions he probably made a few $ 100ks over the span of a few hours.
That level of idiocy for sure begs impeachment. But he's not an idiot if he arose to the presidency, he's got a lot of savvy about how things work and who does what. Definitely worth inspecting inside and out.
You don't need to be a genius to become president as a populist - you just need to get rid of any kind of morals (if you still had some at the outset).
Crypto finally found a great use case then -- It's clearly scam artists and people exploiting their popularity to screw over regular people. There has been an implosion of those recently.
In the future we could use it to measure real popularity by the value of their coin. side note: I've been thinking there should be a HN store where we can buy ingame cosmetics from all these points we've gathered.
Readit News
1. Milei did not sell this as a memecoin at all, unlike Trump, he sold it as a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises".
2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well.
3. 80% of the marketshare was concentrated in just 10 accounts, these accounts made transactions at 0-1 seconds after the president's tweet. There was some clear insider training here.
Was Milei on this or was he just the victim of a scam? In either way he has pictures and met with the coin's creators 3-4 times as the record shows, so he cannot claim he knew nothing about this. I don't personally think he intended to be part of a scam, but it shows some clear incompetence and he cannot promote such things in his official account, scam or not.
I hope this helps people from outside Argentina get another view of Javier Milei, I've read way too many uninformed comments here on Hacker News and other sites about how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
This is a hasty generalization; while I agree on the fact that Milei was incompetent in promoting a memecoin as a financial instrument, that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden, nor that the things he has done for Argentina are inherently bad, it just means he was incompetent on this matter. I am painfully aware of how divided the country is on the current government and its actions, however that doesn't invite sweeping judgments based on a single event. Criticism should be specific and supported by broader evidence rather than assuming total incompetence from one mistake.
Worse. He's a terrible leader. Which is a bad trait for someone who leads a country.
Define bad, I'm sure the insiders who made millions selling Libra at the right time don't consider him bad. If he was involved in the scam, it wasn't a bad financial decision from his point of view (just a stupid political decision). Argentinian entrepeneurs don't consider him bad. Those waiting in line at the soup kitchens probably see it differently...
Deleted Comment
It turns out it doesn't take much to appear to be an economic genius - just stop spending money the government doesn't have and get rid of onerous market regulations (eg. rent controls).
I'm in support of social spending to support those in need, but it's clear Argentina was moving ever-further away from being able to sustain that kind of discretionary spending as a country. They need to get their house in order first.
That shows quite the misconception about what "money" actually is.
Installed industrial capacity at its lowest, real cost in USD through the roof, large corporations that have been around for _decades_ shutting down because of a lack of demand, the shutdown of government programs for vaccine distribution and HIV immune therapy, the complete and absolute mismanagement around forest fires, and the lowest spending in science in the past 20 years.
There is not a single metric in which the country is better off. A couple bankers and mining corporations are doing great. For everyone else, the cost of living is unbearably high and productivity low.
What Milei is doing: he's giving up on Argentinian Peso and adopting the USD as de-facto currency.
This is a political move, giving up national sovereignty in exchange of getting Argentina closer to the USA and away from Latin America. It's no coincidence Trump and Elon Musk are praising the Argentinian president.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peronism
Perhaps he did slow down the inflation a bit, sure, but it's easy to cut government spending when you are basically going into debt with your citizens, not paying government salaries, government contracts, etc. Pretty much everyone in the public scientific or health sector has seen their purchasing power slashed to half, and some of those haven't been paid for a couple of months either.
Nowadays, buying food costs almost R$120 ($20 in todays rate).
Inflation can be stable, but cost of living has gone through the roof for almost a decade now, and Milei managed to speedrun it to a point that a lot of Argentinians are below the line of poverty.
Argentina is very presidentialist and personalist, so everyone thinks this is Milei's doing, but most of the economic measures are done by people from other political party (PRO), with plans that were in the working for at least 2 years for it's candidates. They have nothing to do with what Milei campaigned with.
If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue. With heavyweights such as George Selgin endorsing Milei’s performance to date, it’s going to require some very adept use of the reverse gear if things are subsequently judged not to have panned out as planned (which appears to be the typical outcome of other attempts to apply this school of thought throughout history).
The world does seem very accepting of the current increased poverty levels in Argentina - “it’s always been this way”, “it was just under reported before” etc etc. Maybe.
From a purely human point of view I hope they succeed. The timing could be excellent for them, a Return to prosperity given the current global situation wrt world order and demographics could conceivably put Argentina in a very advantageous position economically?
I have grave reservations about the social science called economics though, well specifically “macro economics”. I worry that this experiment just leads to even more suffering.
just to point it, but he isn't applying much of the Austrian ideas in Argentina. The stuff he ends-up doing tends to be out-right run of the mill monetarism. He didn't do anything new or revolutionary.
Do the Austrian school economists even have ideas that can be applied as a shock, like what you can do in a single year?
It doesn't have to be based in reality. They can just roll out the same argument as "true communism has never been tried", but from the right.
Ultimately Argentina never recovered from the collapse in value of being a food exporter. They're never going to recover until they can sort out the good old balance of payments problem. Doing so is going to be unavoidably uncomfortable as imports get relatively really expensive.
Define "current increased", last data I can find from El País [1] - which is a leftist source - and I have seen repeated in many other outlets - Argentinian and international - is that poverty has seen a sharp decrease in the second half of 2024, and is the same as pre-Milei levels.
[1] https://elpais.com/argentina/2024-12-21/milei-celebra-una-ba...
... Not sure about that; it's not like it has had many success stories, and it somehow manages to chug along.
As in three days before Trump's inauguration? And then $MELANIA the day before? Yes, absolutely no obvious ethical violation there (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-new-crypto-coin-spar...).
> The companies behind the Trump token, CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC, co-owned by CIC Digital, collectively own 80% of the tokens, meaning that Trump-linked businesses could have gained $8 billion worth of crypto over the weekend.
Is there any evidence that LIBRA can do that? If not it's even more scammy.
Okay, so please cite a few more examples of how his economic policies are so terrible in so many ways, particularly compared to the literal decades of economic mismanagement under most of the country's previous governments, and their largess for the sake of garnering supporters.
>If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
Any leader can make a blunder on something or another, even one managing an otherwise complex but possibly successful economic plan. How about an explanation of how incompetent his government is on other matters instead of asking people to "imagine"?
Given the kinds of policies previous Argentine governments regularly enacted, i'd be willing to forgive something like this, and I'd mistrust the ideology behind your reasoning if you can know about the political history of the country while putting special emphasis on this particular apparent scam.
Dead Comment
Not ruling it out, but it’s just as possible that there are bots analyzing the X accounts of leaders and other notable people to jump in front of any such actions.
Would simply be a matter of parsing for something that looks like a token address or links to the same. Buck shot some small amount that is sure to balloon when it actually hits. You’ll get burned by scams and account hijacks, but just one payoff would surely cover it all.
Nah. Leaders and other notable people don't go around talking about niche subjects for no reason at all. It's way more likely that whoever made the transaction caused Milei talking about the coin (by whatever means you want to imagine, usually notable people accept money to promote things, but as much as Milei sound stupid enough to think he can do that as president - what is already a crime - I still expect it to be worse).
Also, there is the clear relationship between him and the coin creators.
If relying on multiple clones of his dead dog, that he also named after libertarian philosophers, to give him policy advice as President didnt tip anyone off, I dont think shilling a meme coin rug pull is going to change their minds
His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.
Deleted Comment
Regarding 3 it seems clear to me that he was not an insider, but he was scammed into spending his political capital and reputation.
As a whole, it's classic cargo cult situation,imitating what a more powerful country is doing without understanding the nuances.
- They can continue claiming their all-knowing leader is an "expert" in everything under the sun. But this means he was an insider! And therefore, he committed a crime.
Or,
- They can claim he was duped in the silliest way possible. I mean, $LIBRA had every possible red flag and anyone with half a brain could tell it was a meme coin. So, that must mean Milei is not as intelligent as his closest followers claim.
Also, he, the president of Argentina, claimed he promoted the meme coin because "he wasn't aware of the details". If he wasn't aware of the details, why did he promote it? Will he also promote random miracle cures? Or only if -- as some people are already claiming -- some money is passed under the table?
lmao, where is the great take?
Regardless of whether this was marketed as as memecoin or a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" they are fundamentally the same thing - a fucking scam. This is equivocal to the amount of effort you would put in to polishing a turd - it doesn't matter as the end result is exactly the same.
What makes it worse is that you'd expect that the Incumbent President of the free world to be held to a higher standard. Not only that, but one of the co-creators of Libra coin has revealed that insiders were able to buy into $TRUMP at $500m at a "special access" private dinner in DC, before it went public. He also reveals he was involved in Melania coin too.
https://youtu.be/EqizJTbxAEM?t=3241
Oh, could he be a lot further from the truth! He could have done at least a couple of orders of magnitude worst with inflation (it was 300% and rising in its peak last year, expected to be 25% this year: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-economy-see...). In the same link, economy is growing/expected at 4.5% this year. The government is at a surplus. The interest rate the state pays on its debt is 29% which looks incredibly high until you see this data: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/interest-rate . Yes, that was a 126% interest when Milei got there. In fact, it is a miracle that Argentina didn't default this year, as they had to do the biggest repay in three years (https://buenosairesherald.com/economics/argentina-pays-us4-3...).
> If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does", which can't be further from the truth, and is behind some people falling in traps like the sunk cost fallacy ("I can't be wrong about this and cut loses, or people will think I'm wrong about everything"), or insufferable people that double down on their mistakes or enter a train of lies, and would do almost anything except accept they were wrong.
We have had these projections for every government since 2001 that have been sheer conjecture just like in 2017. This means nothing.
> This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does"
Is is obvious that you have never seen the man tweet or be interviewed about anything of substance. He is a sheer, utter moron, who holds a fake doctorate from a degree mill and master's from a third-rate university that is notorious for being singled-out in hiring applications that explicitly exclude its graduates for how bad it is.
I have seen said applications when looking at job boards in the early aughts.Dead Comment
"A few hours ago I posted a tweet, as I have so many other times, supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever," Milei wrote. "I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet)." quote from Milei.
The big problem is that people might (or might not) buy crypto based on tweets. No shadow falls over Milei here, one of the true geniuses of our life time! He has done so much for Argentina, freeing it from socialism, and I won't stop until the last remnants and traces of socialism has been eradicated from the argentine psyche.
Then argentina will rise as a great financial power, built on solid capitalist and libertarian values.
I think there will be a lot of brain drain from the socialist EU to Argentina in a few years time. The question is if Argentina would want to receive the millions of refugees from the EU?
Tell me you don't live in Argentina without telling me you live in Argentina.
When this $Libra token launched, everything else dumped as capital flowed into it, and then effectively got siphoned off by insiders. So even people that didn't chase "Argentina's coin" got screwed. Rinse, lather, repeat. There are some winners in this game, mostly insiders and cabals, but a whole bunch of losers.
I would say something's gotta give, but the stark reality is that America's casinos are always jampacked with dream chasers.
It is much worse than that, legitimate gambling is fine.
In meme coins everyone knows they are scamming and and it is a pump and dump but just think that there would be some dumb "bag holder".
In one of the first talks we went to, the panel speaker mentioned that Trump pumping-and-dumping his memecoin was a good thing, because that more or less justifies their own position in doing so, and that it would maybe lower their legal fees in the future. This was followed by a big laugh from the audience.
These people fully know what they are doing.
If you know the rules of the game and you willingly participate, then how is it different from any casino?
I don't buy into any of the people that claim they were scammed, they knew the rules and they tried to make money out of nothing. Other than perhaps trading unregulated securities, I don't see the actual fraud.
To be clear it is distinct from pretending to be a security for an actual productive company, that is actual fraud, but usually the coins are very transparent about having no underlying value.
If _everyone_ playing the game knew the rules, no-one would play. Like all fraudulent schemes, these are fundamentally dependent on getting in new marks.
These memecoins are essentially partially open Ponzi schemes; there are the organisers (occupying essentially the Charles Ponzi role), the naive marks (occupying the same role as the marks in a conventional Ponzi scheme), but in the middle you have the gamblers, the people who are _aware_ that it's a fraud, but also aware that if they get in at the right time they can take some money off the marks and the gamblers who misjudge their time of entry.
(To _some_ extent this dynamic exists in some conventional Ponzi and pyramid schemes; "this is obviously a fraud, but if I get in early I might be one of the winners" is a game that has been played before. Meme coins have really turned it up to 11 tho)
Neither do many of the people who say such a thing here. Instead they regurgitate classic HN talking points around crypto without really considering their logic.
Simple example: calling something like bitcoin a "ponzi scheme" when it's literally run by nobody in particular and has no specific fraudulent promotion being done by its administrators (since there are none) for the sake of personal gain through redirected funds.
I feel pyramid schemes are just a special kind of pump-and-dump scheme, and I don't understand how these aren't being punished effectively and swiftly by the existing laws and enforcement agencies...
Deleted Comment
I can’t believe people are still falling for these claims. Every single time someone launches a coin with claims that purchasing it will help fund some special cause, there is no basis to the claim.
If you want to fund or finance a cause, give your money to that cause. If you buy a meme coin, you’re only giving your money to insiders who held the coins before the pump.
For all the outrage, I yet have to see a single person in Argentina produce a TXHASH that proves they put money on the project. This is not something you can just log in on Binance and buy with cash in a single click. Meanwhile, states operate their own lotteries and casinos (e.g. "Lotería de la Provincia") where the poor and hopeful go to pay a tax on their ignorance.
Of course, the president and his advisors are responsible for not investigating enough and blindly trusting these so-called "businessmen". We'll see what the Law has to say about that, but I remind you that Argentina is a place where a vice-president tried to steal a company (look up Ciccone Calcográfica).
Last, the 4.4B number looks huge, but that is just "market cap", i.e. valuation extrapolated to the total supply of tokens, and not the actual amount of money that went into the coin.
Normally people here (arg) don't follow politicians they don't like on X. It's probable that most argentines that put in any money were his own followers. Among those, there were very well known influencers that actually did complain about the whole issue saying they lost money but they later deleted their posts (Fran Fijap, for example). I agree that a very sizeable portion of people that "invested" seem to be foreigners, though.
Milei's governmental structure is a very vertical one, they even expect para-official influencers to not criticize anything the government does.
You would've definitely been able to buy it with cash and a few clicks, for example using moonshot. (And I'm sure a couple other / similar platforms)
People lost money but I doubt there was much collateral damage
So, it's OK to participate and promote a memecoin rugpull if they're not from your own country?
My introduction to it was at a local mall here. A person just approached and me and I politely said "I don't want it" assuming it was the credit cards or donations and he chuckled and said "sir, it's not credit cards" but I kept moving and then he pointed me to that creepy looking shiny globe/round thing. The moment I saw "Sam Altman" mentioned on a print-out kept there, I couldn't run faster out of there. I later read about it and found out this time around the creepy bugger was out scanning everyone's iris.
I think there are many types of scams after all. Good scam, bad scam, legit scam, illegitimate scam et cetera.
Cryptocurrency 'pig butchering' scam wrecks Kansas bank, sends ex-CEO to prison for 24 years
The massive embezzlement led to the collapse and FDIC takeover of Heartland Tri-State, one of only five U.S. banks that failed in 2023.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/cryptocurrenc...
I'd blame the bank staff just as much as the CEO. No controls, signing off on wire transfers above material thresholds...I assume that Board and bank officers will get reamed for gross negligence and willful misconduct. Those can pierce liability caps and insurance.
He is more of an idiot than a scammer, legally I think the term is negligence instead of fraud. Having recognized that he caused damage by negligence, additionally I think he was a victim too, he was scammed out of political capital and reputation. I don't think he was in on it, although definitely someone near him definitely was, not necessarily a dev, but definitely someone with a "bag", holding it and speculating that it would go up, essentially utilizing their position for personal gain, which I think is a very classic form of corruption.
It's not the minister of economy, it's not his modus operandi (Funds and offshore accounts), this has the markings of someone young. Whatever he got out of it, either by buying early and holding, or by founding it himself, he for sure lost of all of his political capital.
I'll take a look at the specific contract, and addresses, I'm assuming it's a basic pump.fun thing, but there may be more to it.
Similar question, is it better or worse if our country commits war or war is committed upon us?
And perhaps a different question, regardless if whether it is better or worse, which would we rather be if we had to chose.
Also let's remember that 'neither' is also an option. And oops just happened once but let's not make it a habit, is too. No need to go to extremes.
It's very likely they are denying to delay legal consequences or continue monetizing.