I arrived Buenos Aires from Canada on Wednesday 8 November 2023 via São Paulo, the time of year when the northern hemisphere turns towards winter but the south is in full spring.
Buenos Aires is a city I know well and love deeply from a previous live, back in the late '90s when I went to learn Spanish there and visited friends I studied with in London.
I've been back since every five years or so, but last time ended badly when after a dinner together a local friend of mine got mugged by being dragged from ATM to ATM in what is known as sequestros express in Latin America.
Back then, such "express kidnappings" were still a new phenomenon in Argentina, which was considered a lot safer than e.g. Mexico City or São Paulo.
However each visit I did see the country deteriorate, more from visibly appearing at a standstill rather than from actually showing decay, and when I took the cab from Eizeza Airport to my hotel that glorious morning of my arrival, things looked exactly the same as when I first arrived in 1996, more than a quarter century ago.
At checkin, at the unofficial exchange rate, the USD cost of my hotel room - priced in Argentine pesos (ARS) - was almost half the USD amount I reserved it in only a month or so earlier!
So instead of using a card at the official exchange rate, I swapped US dollar for whatever I needed to pay for in pesos on the black market, where the unofficial rate was close to ARS 900 per dollar rather than the then official rate of ARS 350/USD.
Most Argentines who earn in pesos swap them into USD or BTC if they have a surplus, explaining why Argentina allegedly is the 4th largest Bitcoin nation in the world.
However, an estimated half of the population (!) likely does not have a surplus as prices have galloped away, changing daily even hourly. Only when you have USD income or savings - which the better educated typically do and which they stash away abroad - is Argentina affordable, and for foreigners with foreign currency it is shockingly so.
Ghostly grandeur
Apart from the tony urban island around my hotel, in an area of town called Palermo with plenty bars and restaurants and patrons who commute between Miami or Madrid and Buenos Aires, a walk that evening showed me a much poorer Buenos Aires from then city I remembered from only a couple of years ago.
The faded glory of its buildings and boulevards built in the early 20th Century, when Argentina was a leading world economy, are now resolutely dissolute, ghostly rather than grand.
Why did a country with such natural richness and a generally higher level of education and health care than the rest of Latin America fall in such a state state of dilapidation?
Gradually and then suddenly
Argentina reminded me of what Hemingway said in The Sun Also Rises (1926) about how bankruptcy happens: "Gradually and then suddenly".
Over decades, Argentina has been hollowed out by corrupt politicians and a bloated state system, doling out generous handouts to make its people ever more dependent on the government, thinking bankruptcy could be staved off by printing pesos.
Most candidates in the November Presidential elections promised more of the same except Xavier Milei, who for years like a rabid dog attacked the political system and was now seeking election.
When a week before the election I polled friends and everybody I spoke to in Buenos Aires, from taxi drivers to table waiters, who they'd vote for, most said Milei. However, would they get to 51% of the vote if well over half of the Argentine voting public was over the decades made directly or indirectly dependent on the public sector?
Don't lie for me, Argentina
The fact that Milei did get a majority vote (55.7%) is a small miracle and should make us all hopeful that people - hopefully well before bankruptcy stares them in the face! - can transcend individual calculations (about the size of their pension or retirement age, about fuel subsidies, and generally about acquired benefits) if they believe a country will collectively be better off, knowing that systems of state patronage and clientelism lead - in the way of Hemingway - to gradual then sudden bankruptcy.
How Milei will ultimately turn around Argentina is an open question, knowing he does not have support, especially in the provinces where Peronism still reigns. No doubt to get something done he'll have to compromise on everything he said he'd do, such as abolishing the Banco Central and dollarizing the Argentine economy.
In my mind - and I made this case to some people anointed to be part of Milei's cabinet - Argentina should leapfrog dollarization and go straight for cryptonization, without a Central Bank.
However, even without such monetary experimentation, Argentina is now one of the most exciting political developments of recent years and there are a lot of reasons to be positive about the country.
Even if Milei could only implement half of his reform program (and assuming he doesn't turn out the sort of corrupt conman Latin America seems to have a patent on), the country shows that radical reversal is possible.
Europe too faces gradual - perhaps at some point sudden - bankruptcy, with the state sector now exceeding half of some countries' GDP. America too is falling off a fiscal cliff with truly dizzying levels of monetary expansion over the last years.
Ultimately it is in voters' hands to say basta!
