“There is no silver (money).” The phrase, with the force of a sentence, has attempted to summarize Javier Milei’s adjustment policy since December 2023. The saying was printed on t-shirts. “If there is no money, what there will be is sweetness, joy and fun,” was the motto of the Marengo Group when launching at the end of that year a line of candies in tribute to the anarcho-capitalist. Since then, a good part of Argentines have felt the bitter taste in their mouths. As the months passed, the candy industry collapsed and the Marengo Group was forced after 80 years of existence to close its factory amid conflicts with its 60 employees who were demanding payment of back wages. “There is no money,” said the portal Online Politicsbecame “a ominous prophecy.” The South American country is headed for the second recessive period of the Milei era.
The president is convinced otherwise. “Argentina is advancing,” he wrote in If the opposition had not had the “intention to destroy everything” the economic takeoff “would have grown 7%”.
Milei’s euphoria was refuted by numerous economists for whom the Indec numbers are misleading. The miracle is selective. The improvement was due to a performance of 32% higher in agriculture and livestock where employment in the sector only increased 1.4 points. Oil and mining improved by 16% between 2023 and 2025. However, the number of formal jobs decreased by 3.3% in the same period. Financial intermediation rose 18.7% but lost 2% of registered employment. Industry and commerce, meanwhile, fell 3.9% and 1.3% respectively. This decline largely explains the almost 300,000 fewer employees. The January figures are not auspicious either, and this is what has led the Torcuato Di Tella University, whose research is taken as holy word, to ensure that there is a 99% of sinking back into recession.
Candy and steel
Talk has begun about “industricidio”. The first promoter of this process was the Minister of Economy of the last dictatorship (1976-83) on the basis of opening and liberalization, José Alfredo Martínez de Hoaz, for whom It was the same to make candy as steel. Today has given a twist to that comment. The case of the inventors of candies that invited people to sweeten life is far from the only one in a country where 22,000 companies have closed since December 2023. Georgalos, a well-known nougat factory, among them the one made based on peanuts and which has been a classic of the Argentine palate, has suspended its workers, who number more than 600, on a rotating basis. It also reduced their salaries by 20% because, otherwise, their owners said, they would not be able to survive in the face of the avalanche of sweets from Brazil, China and other countries. The Corona beer plant plans to fire half of its workers due to the collapse in consumption. It had inaugurated its plant in 2024. Factory takeovers are increasing in the southern Tierra del Fuego, a kind of free zone where manufacturers of electrical appliances have settled that have stopped being subsidized by the State and cannot compete with imported products. The traditional Pauny tractor factory went into crisis.
Recession and collapse are two sides of the same coin. Companies cannot take out loans because they have to pay very high interest. Financial activity is more profitable than production: Dollars are exchanged for pesos and deposited at rates of 45% annually. They are then exchanged back into dollars. That is one of the activities that is growing in Agentina. “There is a kind of strangulation in private activity. So we have to discuss whether we want this disinflationary process to continue to accentuate, with risks for activity, or to go a little slower,” acknowledged the president of Banco Macro, Jorge Brito.
What matters is to matter
In Santa Fe, the third province of the country and one of the development poles, 2,341 companies closed their doors. “The incentives that are in place to import,” said the Association of Small and Medium Enterprises. The Government has taken 138 important measures to liberalize trade and “increase competition.” Some of the large industrial companies have complained. The closure of the Fate tire factory, with more than 900 employeeshas been presented as a turning point. The discomfort with the indiscriminate opening earned Milei’s contempt. “They have exposed the corrupt system that brought down good Argentines. Thank you very much for this great contribution to the awakening of a country that, despite these criminals, wants to be great again.”
The president of the Argentine Chamber of Commerce and Services, Mario Grinman, was crude in his diagnosis: “Prices are stable, and it is true, consumption has decreased, but expectations, little by little, we know that this is going to work,” he said. For Grinman it is “hard” to admit “that some of us are going to stay on the road, But if that is the price that must be paid so that our grandchildren, our children, have a normal Argentina, a country that progresses with a future, I believe it is worth it.”
“Stable prices” are no longer so stable. The Government is finding it difficult to reduce inflation, which has stagnated at 3% per month. The measurement made by the city of Buenos Aires doubles those numbers for January. If confirmed, poverty in the richest district of the country would be at least six points higher than the Indec statistics. The children and grandchildren to come find many families in difficulty. In the last eight years, a formal private employee lost 16 salaries and a state one, 21, according to the Argentine Institute of Fiscal Analysis (Iaraf). The labor reform is the Government’s instrument to reactivate employment, although unions maintain that it will only create more inequality. The former right-wing president Mauricio Macri also trusts in a fortunate horizon because, according to the magnate, he starts from an incontrovertible reality: “Today a poor person lives as well or better than a king 100 years ago.”
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