President Javier Milei once again showed his polemical side, this time targeting two heavyweights of Kirchnerism: Mercedes Marcó del Pont and Miguel Pesce, former heads of the Central Bank. The reason? Both dared to question the official project that seeks to modify the monetary authority’s charter. And the president did not stay silent.
In a post on X, Milei called them “economic illiterates” and defended the initiative that, according to him, seeks to preserve the value of the currency and eliminate the obligation to finance the National Treasury. “If these two economic illiterates complain, it’s a good sign, since given the disaster they have caused, doing the opposite is a good intuition,” he fired.
But he didn’t stop there. The President invoked the theorem of economist Jan Tinbergen to justify his stance. He explained that to achieve an economic policy objective, an independent policy instrument is needed, and criticized the 2012 reform, promoted during Cristina Kirchner’s second term, which assigned five different objectives to the BCRA. For Milei, that was a “declaration of ignorance” that led to “the continuous acceleration of the inflation rate.”
“Annihilating the Kirchnerist changes to the 2012 Charter is a great step on the path to ending inflation, but the initiative does not end there. We will go even deeper,” the President emphasized, making it clear that he is coming for more.
On the other side, Marcó del Pont and Pesce did not sit idly by. Marcó del Pont, in an interview with Futurock, pointed out that “monetary policy is an instrument of economic policy” and questioned the President’s shortsightedness in thinking that the inflation problem can be solved with interest rates or the money supply. “This government has managed to lower inflation through recession, wage contraction, the exchange rate anchor, and import opening,” she added.
For his part, Pesce warned on Radio 10 that the implications of the reform could be serious. “If you combine autonomy with a single objective, you can fall into a serious trap: the Central Bank focuses only on controlling inflation, and in pursuit of that objective, it may end up causing a deep recession,” he cautioned.
Chancellor Pablo Quirno also chimed in, praising that the libertarian administration has as its “rule of life to do the opposite of what the K’s preach.”
The reform promoted by the government seeks to refocus the BCRA’s mandate on preserving the value of the currency and limiting its use to finance the Treasury, a reverse path from what Kirchnerism took in 2012. Will Milei achieve his goal? Time will tell, but in the meantime, the darts are flying.
Para mí Milei es un facho ignorante que viene a destruir el país, cómo va a llamar analfabetos a los que entienden que el BCRA no es un banco comercial de la Casa Rosada. Yo creo que defiende a los buitres, no a los laburantes, che.
Para mí estos dos son unos chantas de manual, analfabetos económicos que nos dejaron en la ruina. Yo creo que Milei les está dando cátedra de libertad, que se vayan a llorar a otro lado. Vamos Argentina carajo, con un presidente que sabe de números y no de curros como ellos.