"“The IMF’s maximum credit to Argentina… is projected to reach 1,352% of the country’s quota in 2026. This would be the Fund’s largest exposure in absolute terms in its history.”

Before we get to the meat of this story, let’s begin with a wee refresher. On April 11, as readers may recall, Argentina’s faux libertarian President Javier Milei gave a televised address to the nation. Flanked by his senior cabinet members, Milei told the Argentine people that his government had finally lifted the currency controls that had plagued the economy since 2011 so that people can once again buy dollars unhindered.

Economic stability, he said, had finally returned to the country — all thanks to another, ahem, IMF bailout, Argentina’s 23rd since becoming a member of the fund in 1956.

The latest $42 billion injection — $20 billion from the IMF, $12 billion from the World Bank and $10 billion from the Interamerican Development Bank — was intended to artificially prop up the peso in the months leading up to mid-term elections in October. But the peso is already in freefall, and the elections are just two months away."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08/less-than-four-months-after-imf-bailout-and-lifting-of-currency-controls-argentina-is-back-in-crisis-mode.html

#Argentina #Milei #IMF #Neoliberalism #Austerity #Debt #PublicDebt

Here's @RichardJMurphy pointing out the socially positive role that public debt plays in a modern capitalist society... so ignore the headlines & read Murphy's alternative Govt. press release on todays news of 'record' borrowing.

Good sense is easy to find once you step away from the mainstream media.

#politics #media #PublicDebt #economics

https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/07/22/the-press-release-that-should-have-been-issued-on-todays-government-borrowing-figures/

"What happens when you crush the spending power of the people and you give lots of money to big business? Big business collects this money — of course, it’s free money; why wouldn’t they take it? But they look outside the window of their skyscraper in Paris or Frankfurt, and all they see are impecunious masses.

They’re not going to invest, because the many out there can’t afford to buy high value-added goods. But they have this money that has been printed and given to them, so what do they do? They go to the stock exchange and they buy back their own shares.

Their share price goes through the roof, and their bonus is connected to their share price, so they are laughing all the way to the bank. They go and buy a new apartment, a new yacht, more Bitcoins, a work of art. Asset prices go up, while the many are still impecunious and there’s no investment.

After fifteen years of that, it’s the end of Europe. It is the reason why Germany is now deindustrializing. It is deindustrializing because it did not invest anything in the last fifteen years. The managing directors and the members of the board of directors were doing splendidly, but they were not investing.

While the Chinese were investing their heads off and Elon Musk was investing in Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and so on, Europe had zero net productive investment for something like sixteen or seventeen years. That is preposterous. The result is that now, Europe is dying. If people ask — and they should ask — why it is that fascism is having a second or third wind, it is because this is what happens when you have something like 1929."

https://jacobin.com/2025/07/yanis-varoufakis-on-the-legacy-of-greeces-oxi-referendum

#EU #Greece #Euro #EuroCrisis #OxiReferendum #Democracy #PublicDebt #Austerity

💰 #OmegaClick
The Great Money Deception: What is Seigniorage and How They Control the World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn8z13Lsv5A

#BankSeigniorage #TheGreatDeception #BankingSystem #EconomicControl #PublicDebt #FinancialPower #MoneyCreation #HiddenEconomy #MoneyFromNothing #EconomicInvestigation #MoneyControl #FinancialSystem #BankingCartel #DebtSlavery #WhoControlsTheMoney

LoL - Where there's smoke, there's fire and we all know that for the foreseeable future the US will need to continue to buy lots of weapons to send for free to Israel :-D

"Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has insisted the US would never default on its debt as he sought to assuage Wall Street concerns over the state of the country’s public finances.

“The United States of America is never going to default, that is never going to happen,” Bessent told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “We are on the warning track and we will never hit the wall.”

Investor jitters over the size of the US federal debt have mounted as President Donald Trump has urged Congress to push through his “big beautiful” budget bill, which is expected to ratchet up the federal deficit.

Bessent dismissed concerns raised by JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon on Friday that the US bond market would “crack” under the weight of the country’s rising debt."

https://www.ft.com/content/9c652f09-cfca-4078-9e2b-5fdacd772a75

#USA #Trump #Debt #PublicDebt #FederalDeficit

"Since the Seventies, America’s deficits have provided East Asia (first Japan, then China) and Europe (primarily Germany) the demand for their factories’ manufactures. In return, the European Union, Japan and later China sent their accumulated profits to Wall Street to be recycled into US private and public debt, some equities, and real estate. A Chinese official once described this mechanism to me as a “dark deal”. “Our Dark Deal with the Americans,” the official explained, “turns on the US trade deficit, which keeps demand for our manufactures high. In return, our capitalists invest the bulk of their dollar superprofits into America’s FIRE”. (The acronym stands for “Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.”) “Once this process got underway, America shifted much of its industrial production to our shores.”

The problem with this global recycling mechanism was that, to function smoothly, it had to generate larger and larger imbalances: greater trade deficits for the US and more accumulated savings for Northern Europe and East Asia. But there are limits to how large imbalances can grow. Ruptures are inevitable. The longer they are delayed, the greater the pain they inflict — a truth that centrists never acknowledged, not even when it was tearing down their houses.

Trump’s greatest strength comes from asking the pressing question that the centrists refuse to countenance: what comes after the Dark Deal? What comes after the imbalances built on the US trade deficit have proven unsustainably massive? Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, put it succinctly in a recent speech at the IMF: “Everywhere we look across the international economic system today, we see imbalance… This status quo of large and persistent imbalances is not sustainable… The persistent over-reliance on the United States for demand is resulting in an evermore unbalanced global economy.”"

https://unherd.com/2025/05/the-centrist-comeback-wont-last/

#Centrism #Liberalism #USA #Trump #FreeTrade #PoliticalEconomy #TradeDeficit #PublicDebt

"Japan’s finance minister has publicly identified the country’s more than $1tn holdings of US Treasuries as a “card” in its trade negotiations with the Trump administration, in a rare baring of teeth by America’s closest ally in Asia.

Speaking during a television interview on Friday, Katsunobu Kato was asked whether Japan would use its traditional stance as a non-seller of Treasuries as a tool in trade talks with Washington.

“It does exist as a card,” said Kato, adding that “whether or not we use that card is a different decision”.

Japanese holders, including the government, own $1.13tn of Treasuries, the largest hoard held by a foreign nation.

There is no suggestion that Tokyo is considering any sales of official Treasury holdings. But traders said that even the reference to such an action as a “card” could add to volatility in a US bond market that has lurched violently since April 2 when Donald Trump announced sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs on US trade partners."

https://www.ft.com/content/912f861f-26c8-4bcd-aca0-75a09e5767cc

#USA #Trump #Tariffs #TradeWar #Protectionism #Japan #PublicDebt #USTreasuries