Peronomics, Populism and MMT

Carlos Newland (ESEADE) and Emilio Ocampo (UCEMA)

Summary: This paper summarizes the key tenets of Peron’s economic ideas, which have guided
his economic policies and those of his successors since 1946: emphasis on industrialization, trade
and financial autarchy, and active State planning and intervention, particularly in the allocation
of credit and the distribution of income among factors of production. These policies had a
persistent, decisive and negative impact on the evolution of the Argentine economy. Peronism
introduced path-dependence on inflation, deficit and stagnation.

1. Introduction

During a recent official visit of Argentina’s president Alberto Fernandez to Germany, Chancellor
Angela Merkel asked him what was the ideology of Peronism, the political party founded by
Juan Perón in the 1940s. Since a transcript of their conversation was not made available, we
don’t know what was Fernandez’ exact answer. A blogger from The Economist provided an
imaginary version of their conversation that sounds plausible (Bello, 2020). Outside Argentina,
Peronism is an enigma to sociologists and political scientists. The categories they apply in most
countries don’t seem appropriate. It is not Fascism but draws many elements from it, it is not
socialism but appeals to class struggle and leads to similar results. Extremists from the right and
the left claim to be Peron’s true heirs and still cohabit, not without conflict, in the party he
created. According to New York Times columnist Roger Cohen (2014), “to give expression to its
uniqueness, Argentina invented its own political philosophy: a strange mishmash of nationalism,
romanticism, fascism, socialism, backwardness, progressiveness, militarism, eroticism, fantasy,
musical, mournfulness, irresponsibility and repression. The name it gave all this was Peronism. It
has proved impossible to shake”.

Peronism has also been defined as the quintessential Latin American version of populism. Which
may not help much to understand it, since political scientists, economists and sociologists cannot
agree on a definition of the latter (see Ocampo, 2019). In their classic study on the
macroeconomics of Latin American populism, Dornbusch and Edwards (1991) defined it as a set
of policy measures that emphasized income redistribution and ignored economic or financial
constraints. They also described the typical populist experiment as having three phases: an initial
boom followed by bottlenecks, inflationary pressures and foreign exchange shortages followed
by a crisis and a period of austerity. The idea that deficit financing through monetary expansion
can lead to high inflation is anathema to populist policymakers (and their voters). Instead, they
believe it stimulates domestic consumption and an expansion of real output. In reality, as
Dornbusch and Edwards pointed out, it leads to shortages, high inflation and, eventually, a
financial crisis. At the end of the populist cycle, orthodoxy prevails and real wages are always
lower. The paradox of populism is that those who are meant to benefit from its policies end up
suffering the most. According to Edwards (2019b) Perón’s economic policies during 1946-1949
were the archetype of this economic policy paradigm.

In the last decade, both left and right wing populism have spread beyond Latin America.
Although both versions present a threat to liberal democracy they have a different approach to
economic policy. Right wing populism favors protectionism and crony capitalism, whereas left
wing populism adds income and wealth redistribution and extensive state intervention to the mix
(Ocampo 2019). In recent years, some elements of the Latin American populist policy paradigm
have surfaced in the US in the form of what is called “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT). As
Edwards (2019a) has explained, the types of policies advocated by MMT supporters have been
tried in several countries in Latin America with disastrous results. Argentina is in fact a prime
example of what happens to a country that consistently applies those policies. In fact, we argue
in this paper, that Perón was a precursor in the implementation the MMT policy paradigm.

Decades ago, Samuelson (1980) argued that Schumpeter’s prediction that socialism would
inevitably replace capitalism was right. In his view, problem with the original version was that
the definition of socialism proposed by Schumpeter was incorrect. According to Samuelson, the
biggest threat to Western mixed-advanced economies was not the Soviet or Maoist version of
socialism, the one proposed by Oskar Lange in the 1930s, the one advocated by Jan Tinbergen
and Joan Robinson in the postwar era or the 1970s Scandinavian variety, but the type of
populism prevalent in South America, particularly Argentina since Juan Perón. Given the
growing number of countries governed by populists in recent years and the emergence of policy
prescriptions such as those offered by MMT, it may be worth delving into the economic ideology
behind Peronism, a subject that has not received the attention it deserves from economists and
historians (exceptions are Di Tella and Dubra, 2010; Llach and Gerchunoff, 2007, and Sowter,
2015). Peronism not only determined Argentina’s economic trajectory since 1945 but also
influenced the policies of many other countries in Latin America, like Peru and Venezuela.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 analyzes the main features of the Peronist economic
policy paradigm. Section 3 describes the consequences of applying this paradigm. The final
segment offers some concluding remarks.

2. The Peronist Economic Policy Paradigm

According to Edwards (2019b) the Latin American populist policy paradigm is best condensed in
a letter sent by Perón in 1952 to the newly elected president of Chile, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo:

Give the people, especially to the workers, all that is possible. When it seems to you that
you have already given them too much, give them more. You will see the results.
Everybody will try to frighten you with the specter of an economic collapse. But all of
this is a lie. There is nothing more elastic than the economy, which everyone fears so
much because no one understands it.

It is ironic Peron would give such advise when those policies had given him such poor results.
By the end of 1951, the Argentine economy was on its knees, having endured four years of
stagflation and growing social unrest. It was evident by then that the economy was not “elastic”,
as Perón had just launched his “Austerity Plan”. In 1952 Argentina’s GDP per capita ended up
roughly at the same level as in 1946. When cpomparing these years the level of real wages
remained constant. (newland and Cuesta, 2017).]

Peron was an unknown army colonel until June 4, 1943, when together with a group of fiercely
nationalist army officers he staged a coup d’état. Since then, he has been the dominant figure of
Argentine politics even after his death in 1974. Although Peron gave himself airs of a profound
thinker and pretended to be deeply knowledgeable about most public policy issues, his economic
ideas were a contradictory mishmash representative of past and contemporary zeitgeists. Perón
exemplifies well Keynes’ dictum about the power of the ideas of economists and political
philosophers on both statesmen and practical men. He claimed that he had learned economics
during his two-year stay in Italy, a country that, in his opinion, had “the best economists” (Luna,
1971, p. 59). Italy certainly had great economists, but most of them in fact opposed Fascism. One
exception is Franco Modigliani who in his youth was an enthusiastic supporter. In 1936
Modigliani even received “an award for economics writing from the hand of Benito Mussolini
himself” (Klein and Daza, 2013, p.472). Modigliani was by no means the guru of fascist
economics but in several articles he wrote in 1937 and 1938, before racist laws forced his
emigration, he described its essence. In one of these articles he explained that the goal of a
Fascism was to prevent “the exploitation of the weak by the strong”, which he considered the
inevitable result of a free market economy, and promote the advent “of a higher social justice”
(Klein and Daza, 2013, p.477). Social justice is one of key tenets of Peronism (or Justicialismo,
as Perón liked to call it). The other two were being economic independence and political
sovereignty.

Peron’s economic policies were predicated on two assumptions, which he shared with Fascist
economic policies. First, a communist revolution was an imminent and existential threat to
Argentina. Second, communism originated in the injustices engendered by unfettered capitalism.
A third important assumption was that foreign interests allied with a local oligarchy had imposed
a capitalist system in Argentina to exploit “the people”. From a policy perspective, his solution
to this problem was the “Third Way”, which entailed creating a “Corporate State” along the same
lines as Mussolini had in Italy during the 1920s and 1930s.

From 1944 until 1949 Perón was very influenced by José Figuerola, a Spanish exile who became
one of his key economic advisor and collaborators. Trained as a lawyer, Figuerola had been a
government official in Spain under the right-wing dictatorship of general Primo de Rivera. After
the latter’s downfall, he moved to Italy where he studied the fascist labor legislation that was
embodied in the Carta del Lavoro. From Italy he moved to Argentina and joined the National
Labor Department (NLD) where he was responsible for compiling statistics. Shortly after the
1943 coup d’état, Perón took over the NLD and turned it into a ministry with the intention of
making it the springboard of his political career. Perón took an immediate liking to Figuerola,
who authored the first five-year economic plan announced in October 1946.
Ramon Cereijo, who Perón appointed as his first Minister of Finance was also influential in
giving Peronomics some theoretical underpinnings. Cereijo was a finance professor who had
been greatly influenced by the Catholic Church’s social doctrine, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and
Keynesianism, particularly as articulated by Alvin Hansen. Above all, Cereijo emphasized that
Justicialismo had “perfected” economic theory with its rejection of liberal and free-market ideas
(Cereijo 1947; Cereijo 1950). A useful document to understand Peronist thought is a manual
written to indoctrinate the regime’s cadres (Apuntes, 1954). The starting point of Justicialismo
is the existence of a central conflict between workers and capitalists. Although it recognized the
Marxist notion of class struggle, as in Mussolini’s fascism, it rejected the annihilation of the
private sector proposed by communism. Instead, it proposed that the Government (Perón), the
State (public officials) and the “organized community” would determine a fair distribution of
income among workers and businessmen. Basically government had to regulate market forces
when demand or consumption exceeded supply by imposing price control or rationing. In line
with Peron’s speeches, Cereijo argued that foreign companies in general did not operate in a
market of perfect competition, but instead sought to “exploit” the countries in which they
operated. Once again, an active state intervention was necessary, particularly in foreign trade.
Supposedly, bulk purchases and sales through a state export-import monopoly would increase
Argentina’s negotiating power in world markets. An active government intervention and
planning was necessary to achieve “economic independence”, another key tenet of Peronism.
Perón felt that the “revolutionary doctrine” that he had developed with his collaborators had
refuted “the old capitalist truth that is struggling in retreat, persecuted by those people it
exploited for centuries” (Perón, 1951, p. 230).The strong role in economic affairs Perón granted
to the State was not new in Argentina. In fact, the idea of the paternalistic state preceded Perón.
In 1942, Francis Herron, an American journalist who spent a year visiting Argentina observed
the following:

I am at last beginning to appreciate government is important, important beyond

anything which North Americans can imagine. Argentine society depends upon
governmental paternalism. Government, not individuals or individual Enterprise,
creates the great utilities of the nation, influences the educational system, and
directs the development of the country. Enterprise in the Argentine is something
which the people believe must be “fomented” by government. Because of the
 nature of Argentine society, this view of things is natural. The force of private
capital is not known in the Argentine as it is in the United States… Foreign
capital is regarded as predatory, and whether it be of English, United States or
German origin it is not popular… In a country where individual enterprise is
uncommon and where success is difficult to achieve, wealth can most easily be
obtained by a quick stroke at the expense of others. Hence a capitalist is not
esteemed. He is considered to be a schemer, an opportunist, at times even a thief.
A capitalist is not admired; he is more hated than admired. A capitalist is not
regarded as one who promotes civilization; he is thought of as a plunderer. If he
does good, it is regarded as a simulation, and the good he does is presumed to be
for the ulterior purpose of placing himself in a position so that he can make
another profitable deal at the expense of others. This conception of the capitalist
has been inherited from the Spanish colonial system (1943, p.155-156).

One can go back to the mid 19th century to find the roots of these ideas. At that time Juan
Bautista Alberdi, Argentina’s most prominent liberal thinker, argued that one of the greatest
obstacles to the development of Argentina and Spanish America was a deeply ingrained negative
attitude towards business and businessmen. As Alberdi pointed out, all of Argentina’s heroes
were generals that had victoriously led its armies during the wars of independence. Entrepreneurs
were ignored at best and despised at worse (Gómez and Newland, 2014). Peron viewed himself
as the successor of general San Martin, who in Argentina was and is stil widely considered “the
father of nation” and the “Liberator of South America”. He promoted the notion that he waged a
war for Argentina’s economic independence against foreign interests and was thus completing
San Martin’s epic.

3. The Economic Consequences of Peronism

When analyzing the economic policies of the first Peronist experiment, it is essential to
distinguish four phases, the last three of which follow exactly those described by Dornbusch and
Edwards (1991) as typical of Latin American populism. The first phase started at the end of
October 1943 when Perón appointed himself Secretary of Labor and started to exert a growing
influence on the military regime’s social and economic policies. He consolidated his power by
early 1944, accumulating the titles of Vicepresident, War Minister, Labor Minister and head of
the National Postwar Council (NPC). This was the militaristic authoritarian phase of Peronism.
The second phase started at the beginning of 1946 when Perón won the presidential election and
ended in January 1949, when after a long crisis when he fired Miguel Miranda, his “finance
czar”. It was during this period that the economic policies of Peronism that are considered the
archetype of populist economic policies were defined and implemented. A “muddling through”
phase followed during which Perón avoided taking any drastic measures to correct the
imbalances generated by his policies in the previous phase for fears that they could jeopardize
his reelection. Shortly after he won the presidential election of November 1951, started the last
phase. In early 1952 Perón launched a “Austerity Plan” that emphasized increasing productivity
and private sector investments, particularly foreign. This “quasi orthodox” phase ended in
September 1955 when Perón was overthrown by a military coup. When Perón returned to power
in 1973 his economic policies were almost identical to those of the 1946-49 period.1

During the 1930s, increased government intervention was the norm in Europe and North
America. In Argentina, it involved greater control of monetary policy, exchange rates and
international trade. This trend deepened during World War II. Argentina was no exception.
Although after the war there was a trend towards liberalization, particularly in foreign trade,
government intervention continued to grow in many economies through the nationalization of
public utilities, the increase in public employment and the implementation of national
development plans. The UK under the Labor Party was a typical example, which may have been
an inspiration for Perón. Some of his biographers claim that after returning from Italy, he read
works by Harold Laski and the 1942 Beveridge Report as well as the welfare program developed
by Leonard Marsh for Canada (Pavón Pereyra, 2018).

Peron’s first five-year plan compared itself favorably to the Beveridge plan with respect to
pensions. However, the government that emerged from the 1943 military coup led by Perón took
government intervention to a higher level.

1
The Kirchners did the same during 2007-2011. In all three cases a boom in international agricultural commodity
prices helped finance a “Peronist party”, which entailed confiscating income and wealth from farmers and savers to
urban workers and protected manufacturers. The Kirchners’ main innovation was to secure the support of a growing
portion of non-workers through clientelism.
Between 1946 and 1955 Perón closed the economy to foreign competition and intensified state
intervention. The measures he took during his presidency included the nationalization of the
railways and utilities, as well as some industrial and shipping companies. In the banking sector,
he eliminated Central Bank independence, created new public financial institutions to finance
industrial development, allocated credit on a discretionary basis to benefit mostly the urban
industrial sector and nationalized deposits as well as mortgage credit. Foreign trade was put
under the control of IAPI, a state monopoly which was presided by the president of the Central
Bank.

The Peronist regime also increased government bureaucracy. Between 1943 and 1955, the
number of public employees doubled while population grew by only 25%. Public expenditures
grew 60% between 1946 and 1955. Compared with the rest of Latin America, by the end of the
period Argentina had the largest public sector (CEPAL, 1958, pp. 134, 139). The growth in
government expenditures was unchecked by a Congresss dominated by Peronist legislators who
obeyed Peron’s orders to a tee. The constitutional reform that Perón enacted in 1949 reduced the
role of the Legislative power by allowing the Executive to replace annual budgets with bi-annual
or tri-annual ones.

On average between 1945 and 1955, fiscal spending exceeded public revenues by 14% (CEPAL,
1958, p. 149). Although tax pressure increased markedly from 10% of GDP in 1946 to 17% in
1951 (Bellini, 2014, p. 124), revenues did not match growing expenditures, which led to
persistent and growing deficits. In addition, the government incurred in off-budget expenditures
that on average represented half of total budgeted expenditures (Reutz, 1991). The fiscal gap was
partly covered by the issuance of low-yielding bonds that were forcibly placed in state controlled
pension funds (leading to their actuarial bankruptcy). The deficits were also financed with
increases in the money supply. At least during the first years of the Perón presidency, monetary
expansion was not a concern for the government, since it considered it would lead to increase
production and therefore would not generate inflationary pressures.

Cereijo, the Minister of Finance, argued that sometimes it was necessary to resort to deficit
financing. If properly implemented, this policy in his view would inject “vitality” into the
economy (Cereijo, 1947, p. 37). Juan De Greef, a leading Peronist legislator who was in charge
of budget presentations in Congress, explained that under the “Peronist Theory” of public
spending the notion of a balanced budget was irrelevant. “No other ghost frightened our rulers so
much as that of the invincible financial deficit ... but the advice was thrown on deaf ears, and the
State began to spend”. De Greef proudly boasted that in 1948 public spending had tripled in
comparison to 1946. Against demands for greater fiscal austerity, he advocated the principle of
“spending well”, which he deemed more appropriate to the management of a “modern State
”(Degreef, 1950, pp. 34-35).

In many regards, Peronism can be considered a precursor in the application of policies consistent
with so called modern monetary theory (MMT). The general idea was that an increase in the
monetary supply would have real effects on the economy and low impact on inflation. This
concept was exposed by Perón in many of his speeches (1953, p. 861) and by many of the main
officials in charge of formulating and implementing economic policy.

Apparently, it was Miguel Miranda, a wily unscrupulous businessman who convinced Perón
about the “wonders” of using “other people’s money”. Perón had initially called in the economic
experts of the Central Bank staff to help him find a way to finance his ambitious five-year plan.
Their response was that there was no money since the government was already running a
substantial deficit. Perón then turned to Miranda. Many years later he recounted the story of their
meeting:

I told him [Miranda] about the incident with the experts and he said: “General! Do
you think that if they were capable of something they would be earning a
miserable salary as advisers?” –“But Miranda,” I said, “we have to spend a lot and
we don't have any money!”– “That's the way to buy, without money,” he replied.
Only fools buy with their own money! –This is my man, I thought to myself...
Miguel Miranda was a true genius. His intuition, his great capacity for synthesis
and his acute business acumen earned the Argentine Republic in one year more
than what its economists, who are no more than dilettantes and generalizers of
routine and inconsequential methods and systems, had earned in fifty years…
(Perón, 1956, p. 37)
In May 1946 Perón had Miranda appointed President of the Central Bank and IAPI, a
state agency created to control foreign trade through bulk purchases. The following year
he elevated him to the role of Chairman of the National Economic Council, the supreme
authority on economic matters. Until January 1949 he was the all powerful “finance czar”
of Argentina.

Miranda had a very particular vision of monetary policy: currency issuance returned to
the nationalized banking system in the form of deposits, which the Central Bank
controlled, and as a consequence, he maintained, there was no cost to the government
(Brennan and Rougier, 2013, p. 80). There was no financial constraint. It was possible to
create wealth by simply expanding the money supply. Perón clearly assimilated
Miranda's perspective as shown by a speech he made to the provincial finance ministers
in 1947:

We must not forget that we have an annual currency circulation that is much
higher than what we had when we took over the government. The old banking
system had managed to produce an annual turnover of fiduciary circulation
equivalent to four times the issuance: that is, about 16 billion pesos, considering
that the value of the issuance was 4 billion. Now we are turning over eight times
the value of the issuance, so that the annual wealth in circulation has become 32
billion pesos. And we have to take it to ten times, so that we have an annual
turnover of approximately 40 billion. This increase in wealth will mean an
increase in inflation, but also increased activity, which is what matters. In any
case, the resulting inflation will always be kept twenty percent below that of the
country with the lowest inflation. We cannot abandon the natural relationship that
must exist in international trade. I have always thought that, in the economic
sphere, we were going to live without any crisis during the six years of my
government. Today, as a result of new studies being carried out, I believe that we
will have sixty years without crisis (Perón, 1947, p. 29).

According to Antonio Cafiero, a rising star in the Peronist movement who was Minister of Trade
(1952-1955), the quantity theory of money had to be discarded. Money could not be an
“insurmountable obstacle to the strengthening of the national economic capacity” but instead a
tool to promote the country’s industrialization. (Cafiero, 1974, p. 206, 208). Central Bank
Independence was anathema and monetary policy had to be subordinated to the government’s
development plans. Alfredo Gómez Morales, who was president of the Central Bank (1949-
1952) and Minister of Economy (1952-1955), expressed similar ideas. In his view, the Central
Bank, which had been nationalized in 1946, had as its main objective not to safeguard the value
of the currency or to dampen macroeconomic fluctuations but to finance the Government’s
development plans “promoting, guiding and carrying out… .the appropriate economic policy to
maintain a high degree of activity ”(Gomez Morales, 1949a, p. 352). Since Perón nationalized
bank deposits, Central Bank decided the allocation of credit according to the “superior interests
of the community” (Gómez Morales, 1949, p. 355). Peronist policymakers believed that
monetary expansion accompanied by an equivalent creation of wealth would never be
inflationary (Gómez Morales, 1949b, p. 430).

Reality soon refuted these notions. Expansionary monetary and credit policies led in a very short
period of time to higher inflation. Between 1946 and 1949 money supply grew at a 25% annual
rate. In the same period, overall credit grew by 36% per annum while credit to public sector
entities by almost 100% per annum. From 1900 until 1945 Argentina’s inflation rate had
averaged 2.1% per annum, slightly below that of the US. Five years later, it had increased almost
twenty fold. The rise in consumer prices between 1946 and 1955 was at least 500% despite strict
price and rent controls. This sustained increase in consume prices was a direct consequence of
the increase in the money supply, facilitated by the gradual abandonment of minimum gold
reserve backing behind paper issuance that Perón decreed in 1949.

The experience of Peronism between 1946 and 1955 closely follows the three stages of populist
economics described by Dornbusch and Edwards (1991). After an uncontrolled fiscal expansion
and monetary issuance, the development of an inflationary process, bottlenecks and FX shortages
followed by an external crisis a recession. The crisis broke out in Argentina in mid 1948 when
Argentina ran out of dollars to finance a growing trade deficit. In early 1949, Perón fired his
“finance czar” and appointed Gomez Morales to lead his economic team. That year the annual
inflation rate reached 34% and GDP fell 1.6%. The diagnosis made in 1951 by the National
Economic Council, which had overall authority on all economic policy matters, went against
everything the government had done in the past:

Given the importance that the amount of public expenditures has in the
inflationary process, it is important to continue with the policy followed to date,
even though it would be difficult if not impossible, to make greater reductions
than those introduced to date without running the risk of paralyzing some
essential services (cited in Bellini, 2014, p. 124).

But Perón dithered as he faced a reelection and feared that following these recommendations
could jeopardize his chances of victory. It was in 1952, a few after months after securing a
second mandate, that he launched an “Austerity Plan” that sought to limit public spending and
reduce the deficit. In the first year of adjustment, GDP fell almost 5% while accumulated
inflation reached almost 50%. However, the fiscal deficit was reduced to half its level in
previous years (Bellini, p. 127). According to Gómez Morales, it was no longer possible to
continue with what he described as the “Keynesian policies” initiated by Miranda because the
economy had already reached full employment (Vercesi, 1995, p. 48). The application of a more
restrictive monetary policy was also effective. Overall credit fell 36% in real terms between 1950
and 1953 (Bellini, 2014, p. 121.). These measures, coupled with strict price controls, managed
to reduce inflation to 16% in 1954 and half that level in 1955.

But as Dornbusch and Edwards (1991) pointed out, politicians and societies with a populist
culture have limited memory. When Perón returned to the presidency in 1973, he followed he
repeated the same economic policy cycle. This time however, the consequences were a lot more
serious. Public spending increased from 37% of GDP in 1972 to almost 50% in 1975. The result
was a growing fiscal imbalance that reached 13% of GDP in 1975, leading to the first bout of
hyperinflation in Argentine history. This is not surprising since the deficit was financed primarily
with money creation (Newland 2017). The story did not end there. It is an accepted dogma
among Peronist policymakers that there is no direct link between monetizing deficits and
inflation. For example, during Cristina Kirchner’s government both the Economy Minister and
the President of the Central Bank publicly denied that an increase in the money supply would
lead to a higher inflation rate:
 It is totally false to say that [monetary] issuance generates inflation. Only in
Argentina prevails that idea that an expansion in the quantity of money generates
inflation…. We rule out that financing the public sector is inflationary, because
according to that view, price increases are due to excess demand, something that
we do not see in Argentina. In our country the means of payment adapt to the
growth in demand and price tensions are on the supply side and the external sector
(Zaiat y Lukin, 2012)

Again, it is not surprising that in this ideological framework Argentina continues today to have
persistent and high fiscal deficits, recurrent sovereign defaults and one of the world’s highest
inflation rates. Given the permanence of these phenomena and ways of thinking, their
explanation must surely be sought in deeper cultural / psychological causes (see Ocampo, 2018).

4. Conclusions

Until the turn of the 21st century it seemed that Samuelson’s original and reformulated prediction
that a “populist democracy” similar to Peronism would became dominant (1980) were too
pessimistic. The resurgence of populism in Europe and North America and its persistent appeal
in South America suggest that Samuelson’s warning has to be taken seriously. Many of the ideas
that took Argentina down the path of decadence have become standard fare in progressive
platforms. Although right-wing populism may seem more innocuous from an economic
standpoint, it can be as harmful. Besides, populism is essentially chameleonic and opportunistic.

At the time these words are written, the global pandemic crisis hit Argentina. The Argentine
government led by President Alberto Fernández followed the Peronist Manual of Economic
Policy to the tee. He doled out myriad personal and business subsidies that given that the
government is already running a deficit and in the midst of a default can only finance by a
massive expansion of the money supply. If history is any guide, Argentina will graduate from
having a high inflation to having extreme inflation, and maybe even hyperinflation.

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