Odd Lots - Why Argentina Needs Bailout After Bailout After Bailout

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Argentina is getting bailed out again, with $40 billion of help from the Trump administration. Of course, this is a recurring phenomenon for Argentina, and this time it's happening under the free market-oriented Javier Milei, who has slashed spending to bring down inflation. So why is it in trouble again? And why is this such a recurring feature of the Argentine economy? In this episode, we speak with Greg Makoff, the author of Default: The Landmark Court Battle over Argentina's $100 Billion Debt Restructuring. In this conversation, Greg explains the domestic political context for why Argentina hasn't been able to establish a sustainable economic footing. We discuss the legacy of Peronism, Milei's efforts to sharply change course, and the challenge of seeing any economic reform project through to completion, given the pain required get into fiscal balance. Read more:Argentine Bonds Jump on News US Lining Up $40 Billion in AidArgentina Says US Treasury Will Continue to Support Peso Only Bloomberg - Business News, Stock Markets, Finance, Breaking & World News subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. Joe, we are in Washington, D.C. Do you know who else is in our nation's capital? Lots of people. Lots of people are in our nation's capital. Yes. Right now. I could go on and on. There's a lot of people live there permanently, but also a lot of people visiting this week like we are. True. Okay. So one person in particular is visiting who is of note for this particular. particular podcast, and that is Haviate Millay. He is the president of Argentina. And he's meeting with

Trump today. They're supposed to finalize, like, the $20 billion swap that Argentina just got from the U.S. Treasury. Basically, Argentina is getting their, like, umteenth bailout. I tried to count all of them, but then I stopped because I was like, I have a life. But normally, a lot of those bailouts come from the IMF. This one's coming from the Treasury, so it's fairly unusual. It also comes with a lot fewer terms than some other deals. But this is a good time to talk about Argentina and why it seems to constantly be in financial trouble and either defaulting or on the verge of a default. You know I'm like traumatized by Argentina topics, right? Wait, why? Well, I've probably said it once or twice before on the podcast. But, you know,

well, the first time I applied for a job in New York City was with Brad Setser. And he was like, and in the middle of the interview, he was like, how would your character? This is 2006, maybe. How would you characterize the struggles of Argentina? And I just totally blanked. I literally didn't get a word out. I didn't get the job, obviously. So I've sort of, this is a huge blind spot for me. And it's almost like a blind spot I'm afraid to revisit. But we have to dive in. I have to learn more eventually. This one's going to work, right? This one's going to be the last. One more lane, bro. Yes. And you know, the other interesting thing about this is Malay was he was initially praised for reducing inflation. I think it was something like over 200 percent and it got down to 33 percent, which by U.S. standards is still pretty high. But he did that by slashing government spending and selling Argentina's FX reserves to prop up the peso.

And now fast forward a little bit of time and that approach doesn't seem to be working anymore. So, again, there's lots to talk about. There's so much about Argentina that confuses me, including, like, why is it like this? Because there are lots of countries that have institutional struggles of various sorts. There are a lot of countries that are poor. There are a lot of countries that whatever. I can't think of any other country that just is always, always at the trough like this. It's not that poor of a country, et cetera.

I don't really understand why this is this persistent thing distinct to this country. All right. Our first question will be, why is Argentina like this? Yeah, why is Argentina like this? And then after we record this interview, you can write a little essay for Brad Setser and send it to him for his review. And then I'll get the job, yeah. Yes, okay. All right, well, I'm very happy to say that we do, in fact, have the perfect guest.

We are going to be speaking with Gregory Mekoff. He is the author of default, the landmark court battle over Argentina's $100 billion debt restructuring. I read this book when it first came out. It was absolutely fantastic. And even though it's about, you know, a very complex court proceeding. it's a page turner and there are lots of really interesting anecdotes and lots of interesting personalities as well. So Greg, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me.

So I guess I should start with that first question. What's up with Argentina? Well, for the history, they start from the very beginning. Yeah, start from wherever you want. They spend too much. Okay. But lots of countries spend too much. Well, they've, they're particularly politically divided.

and do have a reform effort. Countries have a crisis, then they reform. Hopefully, they embed the reforms, and they graduate to a certain level of stability. But whereas the Mexicos and the Brazils and the Peru's and the Colombias and the Panama's did succeed in the 90s and their Brady programs and have not defaulted since, Argentina and Venezuela have been distinct in not reforming and massively overrun. spending. That's the big difference. There's no magic or no mystery here. Well, can you explain maybe just, I think this might be helpful for me. What is it about the political environment of Argentina, which is not the poorest country in the world by any stretch? What is it about the political environment of Argentina such that it's never been able to, as you put it, embed reforms in the

ways that other countries that struggled in the 90s were able to? Machine politics, peronism. So all I know about Argentina comes from basically your book. I covered the New York court case a little bit when I was at the FT, but also all my knowledge comes from Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, Evita, which is fantastic and I highly recommend. But can you explain what peronism is? Yeah. Peronism is kind of a shapeshifter, but it goes back historically to one Peron, who was the president

or dictator for a while in the 50s, and he, in the post-war world, was aligned with labor forces and cut the country out from the outside world, nationalistic. It became a political machine that controlled the apparatus of government and the unions and everything. So it embedded itself. Carlos Menom, the president in the 90s who were formed, was a peronist. He had the political machine, but he was a reformer. An imperfect reformer, and that broke down in 2001. But then the Kirchner's were also Peronists, and they have a particularly virulent version of Peronism, which is really what we're talking about here is Kirchnerism.

So peronists come in many different flavors, and when we're talking about the current situation, it's really the Kirchner version of peronism versus the miller. version of let's finally balance our budget. I want to get to Millay, obviously, but just go into this a little bit more, machine politics. Again, not something that's alien to other countries in the world. That's fairly common. Talk about this sort of application or every country is some kind of machine politics. What makes that Kirchnerism, et cetera, so powerful and difficult to dislodge?

How is it operationalized the machine? The way the cash moves. Okay. In that if you get a bailout check during COVID, you get it from the federal government in the mail. Okay. In the 2001 crisis, some of the emergency money that was allocated, even from international institutions, was given to Argentina, who was given to Peronis party operatives to hand out in the barrios. You literally get checks from party operatives or in regions. from the party governor under a picture of the governor in Peron. So in many cases, the cash flow

looks like a gift from the leader and the party. And then when the leader says, oh, there's a Peronist rally in Buenos Aires. We'd like you to get on a bus. The people who depend on them for the check say, I guess I got to go. Wow. I had no idea that happened. Okay. So Millay campaign on a platform of massively reducing government spending in order to bring down inflation and all types of austerity. It wasn't necessarily IMF-style reform, but it was supposed to be a reduction in spending. And yet, here we are, and Argentina is getting its $20 billion bailout. Do the politics of economic pain, I guess the idea of people no longer handing out checks in the barrios and stuff like that, does that make?

make serious spending reductions just untenable in Argentina? We should back up a bit and get a bit historical. Because the people voted in 2023 for Millie because they were in such economic chaos. They voted for a complete outsider with a very particular message that had a lot of truth for them. And his promise was, pain now, success later, let's finally have reform and sustain it to stop this 200 years of boom, bust, devaluation, and default. Now, the context of this, just from 2001, is the country, the program of the 90 of

men am falling apart in facing a devaluation and default, $100 billion debt default, as I talk about, in my book, the people were in the street screaming, they all must go. And they were banging pots and pans, clink, clink, clink, clink. And the president left in a helicopter from the top of Casa Rosada. And they had a reform program. They ran a very tight budget, tighter even than Millie is running between 03 and 05. But then they didn't sustain the reform. and after 2010, they've been in the boom, then the bust, and default from 2010 to 23. So again, they voted for Millie because they were saying they all must go. The rest of the political class who couldn't deliver must go.

We want stability. Now, the brilliance of Millie is he said, we spent too much, we print too much money, we have inflation. And that was true. And he symbolized it with a chainsaw. Right. Because it was the problem and the solution. I've seen pictures of him at a rally.

He's not even talking. He just holds it up. That's really powerful. And he lent that chainsaw to Elon Musk as well. Oh, he did? Yeah, that was Malay's chainsaw. Wait, what happened to that other guy? What did there's some guy that we're on 2016 or 2017 that's?

all the international community loved that thought he was going to be the great neoliberal reformer there? That was Macri. Oh, yeah, Macri, right. What happened to that guy? Well, the people were tired of the chaos of Christina Fernandez de Kirchner, who was present for two terms after her husband, Nestor, was present for one term. He died after her first term. He was going to run again. So she had two, and things were bad, including on the bond of fault and all the litigation.

And Macri is like, I'm going to bring a normal country. And he did some great things at first, but his program fell apart, which brought back an even worse peronist administration with Alberto Fernandez, who had been the chief of cabinet for Nestorchner, with Christina Fernandez de Kirchner as the vice president. And COVID hit. They did default again. and they handed over the reins to Millay with like 150% annualized inflation. So there was an urge to reform under Macri, but he had such a bad imbalance of too much monetary emission in the local market. He couldn't get out from it fast enough.

He tried to slow walk it and be gradualistic, and he couldn't make it through. So Malay took a chainsaw to government spending in Argentina, it seems. Inflation did come down. Why do they need a bailout now? Their umpteenth bailout. Actually, I should ask you, you might actually know how many times Argentina has been bailed out. I have the number on how many defaults. Okay. The bailouts, we'd have to check the number. But first of all, I would term the Treasury's support is not a surprise and was always in the cards. from the IMF program in April. The IMF program for what it was doing in the negative reserve position they inherited from the prior government was always too thin. They were always vulnerable to a speculative attack. They were always vulnerable around the midterm elections. And a speculative attack occurred. And as Treasury hinted they would, they stood behind the IMF. This is nothing new. This is not a failure of the program. this is completely predictable. The way it unfolded in the speed leaves a bad impression, but as an observer for a long time, this was no surprise. And Besson's word, we really need to have

an orderly election here. This is true. The people have to choose. Are we going to sustain reform and stop defaulting? Or are we going to go back to the other way? and go back to overspending, money, printing, devaluation, inflation, and default. There's a very stark difference between what the Kislov leadership of the party will lead the country to and what a continued leadership by Millay and a center-right coalition will. Can you actually explain a little bit further? Reform is a nebulous term. Sounds good, but I don't know what it means.

What substantively have we seen from the current administration in terms of either spending cuts or so-called reforms. What's been done so far? The single number to focus on is the primary surplus. Okay. It's kind of like the free cash flow for a company. Yeah. But it's your net cash flow before your debt payments, your revenue in minus your expenses. And your debt does not stabilize unless that's positive and positive enough to pay off your existing debt at a reasonable pace. countries like us, the U.S., were running negative primary surplus, which means we're incurring more debt and we're refinancing maturing debt with more and more, which has debt going up. Argentina, to stabilize its situation, has to run a primary surplus of, let's say, 3%.

Under Minister of Economy, LaVanya, who was a great reformer from 2002 to 2005, when Kurchner fired him for being too tough, they were running a 5% primary. totally stabilize the economy. Millie's program is carefully calibrated to stop monetary emission and stabilize the economy. There's nothing arbitrary about it. It is the kind of macroeconomic stabilization that you have to do. It makes sense, and moreover, it is done sensitively. They protected the basket of money available to the poorest households.

So where are they cutting? They adjust a lot of different things. Most importantly, they did things like, you don't get free buses anymore. You don't get free trains. So they move the costs of those things up to a market rate and utilities. Because the Kurchner's, they also defaulted on all the utility contracts in 2001. They never normalized utility rates. So one of their fiscal problems after 2010 is they were subsidizing the power bills for everyone,

which was costing 4% of GDP a year. that's why you have a primary deficit. And they said, we can't do that. So they corrected those popular household subsidies, and they did some adjustments, including to the indexation of pension. And that's a next level topic in terms of what the Kurchner's did to re-index the whole society. So we've been very focused on what Argentina itself is doing and why it seems to be in a perpetual financial predicament. But maybe we could talk about the role of external actors a little bit more. So in your book, again, fabulous story of the big court case over Argentina debt. But one of the criticisms of this whole process is that every time you successfully work out defaulted. debt or every time you reach a settlement, the country can just return to market fairly quickly, right? So it's never really punished that much or enough to make it seriously think about reducing its debt. Is there some truth to that? Are there things that external actors like the

court system or the IMF should be doing to stop this from repeatedly happening? I really think the question you ask is the most important one, but it's really about the soul of the Argentine people. Have they had enough pain to insist their government follows robust financial policies? They either elect people who will be straight with them about what they can afford and set up policies they will follow, like Gordon Brown's Golden Rule and things like that, Or they will elect politicians who say, oh, I'll make it easier on you. And so the people shocked me in 2023. On finishing my book, I was depressed. I saw no way out of perpetual chaos.

And then Milley came, and they voted for him because the people said, please, we want to be an orderly country. Now we're at the midterm, put aside the last six weeks of chaos. You're asking the people, will you stick to the plan to get to the finish line, or are you going to say, we're tired, we don't want to try so hard and again. They may very well go from Miller and Macri and say, we do want to complete it. We didn't like this blowup that happened. We don't want to go there, or they're going to do something else. So no outside party can tell a sovereign nation what to do. no judge, the judge makes it worse.

The IMF, it has to come internally. Is the problem democracy? I mean, we've talked about, no, for real, like we've talked about this in the context of Fritz Bartel wrote a book, The Triumph of Broken Promises, similar story with the post-Soviet states and how they ultimately broke apart from the Soviet Union because of this sort of difficulty that they had in making difficult decisions and these attempts to impose austerity or live within their means, et cetera, and they finally, like, it didn't work anymore. And in the early 80s, somehow the UK found a way to, you know, sort of do an internal adjustment.

But these things are, like, really hard in a democracy. They're really hard in a system in which every two years there's a referendum on how it's going. And if it's painful, I understand why people don't want to continue with it, even though maybe long term. It's beneficial. Like, I'm not really proposing this, but like in your view, does someone like a milani need like a nice, like 10 year or 20 year runway where he doesn't have to face the voters? You know what I'm saying? Like, is this the issue is that these difficult things keep coming up for a vote over time and in the middle? It's like, what are we getting here? Yeah. And somebody wrote a book that a Black Rock manager gave me, says, Greg, this is the best book. It's called

a free country deep in debt about the histories of country's getting in debt. He said, you don't need to know any more than that. But there's this challenge between democracy and running a balanced budget. But populations learn. And I heard, I think it was a Moody's analyst or a Fitch analyst last year talking about the debt trajectories in Europe. He said, France is going up, and this country's going up, and the UK is going up. But you know what? Greece is going down and Spain is going down and Italy is going down because the crisis country, people don't want to go through the disaster again. So when you have people like Argentina who dealt with hyperinflation, they don't want to be lied to. They know the cost of no pain now

and suffering later. Now, Americans, we don't know. We're willing to have the government massively overspend because we want low taxes now and more benefits now. And we don't know what an unbalanced budget mean. You can go forever. But when you, you've been in Argentina and you've suffered it, you want a government who says, I'm not going to overspend because you've lived the cost. Countries, the people embed that knowledge in their voting behavior and they can sustain it year after year. That's called graduating.

That's the point of this election, this midterm. Did the Argentine people get the message and they are now going to sustain the path because they understand the costs? Or are they going to just say, I'm tired of it? let's go back. We don't know the answer. We will know on the 26th of October after they vote on the 27th. And it's an incredible historical moment that we're facing. Okay. So the new bailout that's getting finalized today in D.C. between Trump and- We're recording this the 14th, by the way, October 14th. I should have said October 14th.

So the new bailout does have direct U.S. involvement. I know you said it was part of the earlier IMF agreement, but still people are, you know, talking about the U.S. doing a $20 billion bailout of Argentina. Do you think that involvement changes maybe creditor-debtor dynamics in the future? I think in the short term right now, it's a big bazooka to stop a run on the bank. There is a speculative attack on the Argentine peso at the worst possible time. and the Perona start amping it up. Christina Fernandez de Kurchner, I think it was October 1st, is on X saying, oh, he's going to devalue right after the election. And, okay, pour more speculative attacks on.

That's kind of odd behavior towards your own country. And so Treasury is responding by putting a huge bazooka. It's very expensive to be short. And so this should put all those shorts out of business. They have an orderly election. And you don't even know the extent that these sort of external things nobody understand really affects behavior. They're living their life. They're worrying about their bills.

They know their local stories about what's happened, what Millie has done and hasn't done, and what people are saying. This is just another piece of noise in a complicated picture. External creditors, that's a different question. This is perceptually very important. Bonds started rallying because you have. people like was it, Bob Citron said he immediately bought a lot of bonds and they went up. And he's saying, oh, Treasury is backing Argentina. You buy long-term bonds because of short-term ballot.

That's a risky thing to do, but it's pro-Argentina. It helps stabilize the situation. But the market is so afraid of Kiselof in particular. So not just Peronism, which I explained it had reform, reminem in early Nestor Kurchner was quite reformist, but it has this Kisselawe, Christina Fernandez de Kurchner version of peronism, which involved notorious defaulting. And Kiselov was directly involved with the nationalization of YPF in 2012, which you know led to the $16 billion judgment in the court because the way minority shareholders were treated. The non-payment of some GEOPLE,

DP warrants that were due, I think, in 2013, which led to a 1.5 billion judgment in the UK court, and was deeply involved with Christina Fernandez de Kurchner, and the re-default under the Perry Paso threat in 2014. Kislov went to New York and failed to negotiate in a deal, which was basically on the table slightly better than what Macri took two years, a year and a half later, but wouldn't take it or couldn't figure out how to take it. And so, foreigners see this ghost of default their past as coming back into power. So if they see any big chance of Kislov coming back, they're going to run. So that's how the bondholders buying dollar bonds in New York think.

They're very happy when Treasury comes. But we should talk for a minute about the election and what success means. Can I ask one more question before we talk about that? Yeah. Why do investors keep buying Argentina bonds? I should play you this tape. The Second Circuit, in one of their two hour and a half hearings, Judge Pooler, Rosemary Pooler, who was the nice judge in a very kindly voice, at the end of a hearing, looked at Argentina's counsel, Jonathan Blackmun. It said, can I ask you a question, sort of off the record?

He said, sure. She says, why would anybody who can read ever buy a bond from Argentina? That's right. Jonathan Blackman had the best answer. He's like, they didn't default arbitrarily. They were suffering a crisis worse than the Great Depression. It was like Weimar, Germany, with middle class people selling their furniture on the street. Like, he was brilliant in that spontaneous answer to the question.

But I keep thinking of that question. and we're back there. But Millie and the pro party with Macri and Reformists, they don't need a lot at this election, in this sense with 33% of the lower house, they continue to veto legislation they don't like and rule by decree and things. So the chance that the peronists completely take over

the legislative branch is really low. We're just facing a more bigger, picture, perceptional question, which direction is the mind of the voter going in leading to the next presidential election? Are they really tired of Millie and they're going to go back to Kisloff as their leader? Or are they going to stick in the reformist direction with some complaints and demands for readjustment of direction? So what should we watch? So, okay, tell us a little bit about what date is the election again? October 26th. Okay. So what should we be watching for on that day so that we can be smart

and I can, you know, post a tweet that's inside for something like that. So it's first the percentage that Mill Ice Party gets. Okay. Plus the percentage that Macri's party gets. Plus then the percentage that other center reformist center right parties get. And you want to know they have blocking minority, a veto proof minority in each house. That's the minimum, but you would hope that they get a majority as a coalition in, let's say, the lower chamber. So there's between the best case and the lower case.

What the markets, the bondholders in New York would fear is a sort of blowout for the peronist and the strong message from every corner of the country. What's the name of the Peronist party? It keeps changing its name. So right now, they often set up a new. a vehicle for every single election. So the name changes so much. So I kind of avoid the names. Okay, but it's the Peronist Party.

Yeah. Now what they're calling themselves is force a patria like Homeland Party. Got it. I see. So the reason these anxieties kicked off is because there were some small regional elections in which they did well, which got people in the minds of thinking, oh, they might have a really good midterms. Oh, no.

It's far more fun than that. Okay, good. And there's a lot of history. Okay, good. It was not a small regional election. It was the biggest region of Buenos Aires who had an off-cycle early election for provincial offices, and it was a deliberate political ploy to bring down melee. Here's the history. In the presidential election, they had the primary in, let's say, July, August, the presidential elections in October. The weirdest system ever, called the PASO is the primary where you don't vote by party for your candidate within the party. Everybody votes for all the candidates. And those who run for a party or those who ran better, but it's kind of like an early vote on who's going to win.

And Alberto Fernandez, with the former president, Kurchner, running as his vice president, did so well that the markets taint. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy that Macris people can barely make it to the finish line because the currency and local interest rates and bonds were exploding. And so that lesson meant Millie in February said, we do not want to have a PASO. We don't want to have a primary. We just want to have the election in October. So they got the Senate to agree to take the PASO off the table. But then Kisalov, where the strength of Pironism is in the Buenos Aires province where a lot of poor people are, he said, oh, let's have our provincial election six weeks or whatever before, because we know we'll do well. And they anticipated Millie would pound his chest.

I'm going to get the majority. And he might fail. And he did fail. And even though we got, let's say, 35%, which nationally would be his veto-proof minority that he minimized. needs to continue to rule, it was less than he said he'd get. So he did not manage the perceptions well. And his political team got stung by that. And he admitted it wasn't handled well. So there was a lot of history in this early vote being engineered. And as far as the Peronostar concern, it was a perfectly executed attack on the stability of his program.

So this speculative attack is not a failure of the program. It was really a deliberate political process ahead of an important vote. I have a question actually about Miele. You know, he has this whole vibe. He's sort of a colorful character. I think he quotes like Austrian economists and stuff like that, calls himself a libertarian. Sort of iconoclastic and all that.

But setting all that side, like, would you characterize his economic program It's like fairly normie, IMF style, regular economics. Yes. And you have to separate the political character from the policy. And you have behind him, remember, he got elected. He did well in the PASO, the primary, in 2003. I don't know if it was 35%. And he beat out Macri's candidate.

So Macri said, I'm going to support you. So he got to 55 percent trouncing the Peronis opposition with Macri's support. But part of the deal was that Milley then took the superstars, the financial superstars of Macri's administration, Caputo and Basili, to be his minister of economy and his head of his central bank. Already, Milley had chosen Federico Sturzenegger, Harvard professor, had worked in the Macri government, too, to be as head of reform, has been churning out pages and pages of reforms to make the country more efficient. He has the tightest, best technical team behind him, great economists negotiating with the IMF, making sure the execution of the plan is perfect, which is not something Argentina has ever seen. Having looked at 30 years of history, this is an amazing

tight team. They work together as a team. Milley completely supports them. But on top of them, he says all kinds of wild things. He's kind of a Trumpy character like that. So you have to separate the sort of wild things he says from the policy. So if I could ask you to put your betting cap on, if you have one, how do you think this plays out? Does Milley retain the majority? And Argentina is now on a path to non-defaults after many, many, many years, or are things going to go sideways again? I think they'll be fine. I think the events of the last few weeks will be noted in the history book, but the people want normalcy. Argentina can always surprise you, but having looked at what they've lived through, they understand what's happening, and I'm hopeful that this shocking instability

has reminded them of what's going to happen if they don't stick with the plan. You mentioned that the Millay character is sort of Trumpian. Trump himself, is he Millayan? What is it? Like, if you thought like, okay, was Trump, who does he remind you of in Argentina? Perone. Okay. It's totally ironic.

They're total opposites. I've written pieces about this. You have two characters who bind at an emotional, political character level, one of whom is massively overspending in the United States. Another one is running the most discipline reform ever and their best friends. And then we have this bailout. You can't make this up. So nonfiction, who needs fiction when you have Argentina? No, indeed.

All right. Greg, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. the book is default, the landmark court battle over Argentina's $100 billion debt restructuring. And if you're interested in this topic, definitely go pick it up. That was fantastic. Thank you so much. Thanks, Greg. That was great.

Thank you. Joe, that was very interesting, very timely. Do you feel like you could write a little answer essay for Brad Setser now? I mean, like for a job interview when I'm 25 or 26, I could probably maybe come up with. I literally had nothing. It was so embarrassing. I like, you just like you open your mouth and nothing, no words come out. That's what happens.

Yeah, that's painful. What I'm really interested in still is why the political environment is as messed up as it is or messed up as it seems to be. And what is it about Argentina specifically that somehow other countries like the Mexicos, et cetera, didn't fall into that trap. But also, like, you know, if it gets going, say, I don't know, I worry. I worry about all kinds of things. But corruption, debt, et cetera, it seems like you could fall into some very bad, very bad cycles that are hard to escape from. Well, it also feels like there's a tension between what Greg was saying about, you know, the Argentinian people need to decide if they've had enough of, you know, being serial defaulters and high inflation and if they're willing to trade that for austerity. But on the other hand, you know, having someone come out to the barrio and hand you a.

a check for a bunch of cash. Sounds really good. So it does seem to be a decision for sure. Yeah, it seems really difficult. And there's just the, you know, there's just the reality that, okay, you can get by without help from abroad. But then you might have to deal with sort of a massively reduced standard of living, devalued peso, et cetera, no easy options. Yeah.

I'm also still kind of wondering who is buying Argentina bonds all the time. Well, let's find an investor. I mean, haven't they done well? Don't they always, like, you know, they end up with a bond and a yacht or something like that? Don't they end up? They get a ship? It was bigger than a yacht. Okay.

All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart.

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