After days of speculation about who will replace former presidential candidate Sergio Massa as head of the Ministry of Economy from December 10th, sources close to Milei told the Argentine newspaper Clarinthis Thursday (23), that economist Luis Caputo, former Minister of Finance under Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) and former president of the Central Bank, was chosen for the position.
Managing the ministry will be one of the new government’s biggest challenges, as the country faces an economic catastrophe, with annual inflation above 140% and projections of a sixth GDP retraction by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Graduated in Economics from the University of Buenos Aires, Caputo is considered a great specialist in the international financial market, starting his career in private foreign companies. He was head of Trading for Latin America at JP Morgan Chase, one of the world’s leading financial services institutions, based in New York; he created an investment fund company and was a member of the World Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency.
The 58-year-old economist joined Mauricio Macri’s government in 2015 as Secretary of Finance, taking over as head of the ministry two years later, following the resignation of Alfonso Prat-Gay, who left the ministry after receiving criticism for the delay in the economic recovery. promised at the beginning of Macri’s administration. As soon as he took office, Caputo divided the ministry into Treasury and Finance.
It was during the years of his administration that Argentina negotiated a US$16.5 billion (around R$80 billion) agreement with defaulting bondholders and presented a “relief in the country’s image” in the international capital market.
In 2017, when Argentina was experiencing a good economic phase, it was also responsible for issuing an Argentine Treasury bond maturing in 2117, earning Caputo the slogan of the “man with the 100-year bond”.
Macri’s former minister left the Ministry of Finance in 2018 when he was appointed president of the Central Bank, after Federico Stuzenegger, another name considered to take over the Economy in the future government, resigned. During this period, he had disagreements with the then Minister of Finance, Nicolás Dujovne, and with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), leaving his position three months later, alleging “personal problems”.
A source involved in the negotiations of the new elected government told the portal Bloomberg Linea that Caputo offered to obtain international financing in order to balance Argentina’s external debt, carried for years without resolution by the last government of Peronist Alberto Fernández.
On Wednesday (22), during an interview with Argentine television, Milei indicated that “Caputo was someone in a position to occupy this position”, in reference to the Ministry of Economy.
During the election campaign, the libertarian defended two striking proposals for his government: the dollarization of the economy and the end of the Central Bank.
According to a report from Caputo’s company, accessed by the newspaper Infobae, the economist chosen to head the Economy declared that the new government must follow “an orderly process that is not disruptive to market dynamics”. Furthermore, he highlighted that he ruled out “a scenario of dollarization at any price”.
In addition to controlling meteoric inflation, the new government led by Javier Milei will have the mission of managing the issue of price freezes imposed by Peronism, a strategy often used in the final stretch of the elections to try to win over more voters through populist measures, in addition to the poverty level of the Argentine population, which has reached more than 40% in recent months.
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