20/12/2010
I couldn’t have been more than 9, and like any 9-year-old on a hot summer day, I was waiting in the coldest part of my house for a phone call from the only friend I had with a pool. It was a reluctant friendship; at six he’d ordered me off his property and I’d never quite trusted him after that banishment. Ours was a relationship of convenience. We both knew it. And I never fooled myself into thinking I was anything more than a temporary cure for his boredom. And that was fine with me, because as I said, along with having more toys than he knew what to do with…the pool.
Despite being in the basement, I must’ve got to the phone by the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Meet me at the park in 10 minutes.”
Always dictatorial, he’d already hung up. It wasn’t the invitation I’d expected or wanted, but I was curious. I told my mom I was meeting him at the park and immediately ran out the front door.
He was sitting under a giant oak tree with a backpack in front of him and a smug look on his face.
He passed me the backpack.
“Look inside.”
There were more twenty dollar bills than I’d ever seen in my life, and since I was in the habit then of converting everything monetary into its equivalent value in penny candy, my underdeveloped accounting skills told me we had enough money to fill his pool with Swedish berries. And when he told me our next stop was 7-11, I started to think that was a distinct possibility.
As the spending spree came to an end that day—both of us sick from all the candy we’d eaten, I finally admitted to myself how unlikely it was that his grandfather had given him $700 in cash for his birthday. It all got cleared up later that day when his mom called to explain what had happened. The short-lived façade was over; he was grounded for a long time, and I didn’t get to swim there for the rest of the summer.
I guess we all delude ourselves from time to time, but the longer we do, the harder we fall. The stories my Argentine friends have told me about life before and after the 2001-2002 financial crisis often made me think of that indulgent day from my childhood. Former Minister of the Economy Domingo Cavallo had pegged the peso to the dollar at one-to-one, and though it was ostensibly implemented to fight hyperinflation, no one could deny they enjoyed the benefits that came with the façade.
One Argentine friend of mine told me he spent a significant amount of time in England as a teenager, learning the Queen’s and drinking like a proper Londoner; it was the time of his life, and he looked back on it fondly; but he’d always known something wasn’t right. He as a teenager, and I as a 9-year-old, could both smell rats; they just smelled too good to do anything about it.
So when the proverbial shit hit the fan in Buenos Aires and everyone woke up from the nightmare with their savings worth a third of what they had been, the first to feel the wrath of the Argentine populace was the government; the De la Rúa administration had to go. As did the three Peronists who took his place and left as quickly as they came. And when there was finally no one left to blame in government, the hunt for a scapegoat quickly led them to the IMF.
IFM loans and the requirements of neoliberalization were the roots of the problem; they’d been duped, tricked. If the IMF thought an Argentine default was a strong possibility, they shouldn’t have given them the money in the first place.
It was a variation of my friend’s 7-11 defense; his grandpa surely shouldn’t have left all the cash out if he didn’t want it spent on candy and comic books.
It was the drift towards that way of thinking that made the 2005 decision of Néstor Kirchner’s government to pay the IMF debt back in its entirety, a hugely popular ‘up yours’ to the Fund that had abandoned them when they needed them most. No longer would Argentines be beholden to IMF “recommendations”. Given the choice, they chose the highway.
That is up until last week.
After a five year absence, the IMF is back in Buenos Aires—invited by none other than the wife of the man who distanced his government from the Fund. This time, though, they’re there to evaluate what appears to be a flawed Consumer Price Index. It’s believed that for the last 5 years the National Statistics and Census Institute has been underestimating the CPI in Buenos Aires, which is used to represent the nation as a whole. And since the IMF does annual revisions of all its members’ statistics, regardless of whether they’re a debtor nation or not, and the likelihood of a glaring difference in metrics appears to be strong—the Fund has threatened sanctions for non-compliance.
So off to Washington Minister of the Economy Amado Boudou flew, coming back with an announcement that a team of IMF academics and consultants were en route to Buenos Aires to find out what the real inflation rate is.
That answer will come in six months. And though no one is seriously thinking about 2001-2002, it’d be disingenuous to say there isn’t a slight suspicion they’ve again been caught with their hands in the candy (cookie) jar.
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