Niall Ferguson‘s thread on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, thanks to the Thread Reader App:
While the world fixates on Donald Trump’s populist cocktail of reciprocal tariffs and big, beautiful deficits, @JMilei is delivering a man-made miracle that should gladden the heart of every classical economist and quicken the pulse of all political libertarians.
@JMilei has brought monthly inflation down from 13% to 2%. The economy is now growing at an annual rate of 7%. Investors no longer shun Argentine bonds and stocks — indeed, they were among the best investments you could have made over the past two years. After a brief upward jump, the poverty rate has fallen from 42%, when Milei was elected, to 31%
These are astonishing feats. And they have ramifications that go far beyond South America. Free-market economics and political libertarianism are sometimes dismissed as a fad of the “neoliberal” 1980s, long ago superseded by the new populisms of the left and the right. Not so. The world has never seen a government more radically libertarian than @JMilei. But the amazing thing is not that it is working economically. The true miracle is that Milei’s shock therapy is working politically.
With his leather jacket and late ’60s mop top, @JMilei is part–rock star, part–mad professor, dancing, singing, and screaming his catch phrase: ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! — “Long live liberty, damn it!” It’s as if Joe Cocker had gone onstage at Woodstock and sung “I’ll Get By with a Little Help from My Friedman”. Never in the history of democracy has a tribune of the people won power this way.
