Kudos to Javier Milei for winning the Argentine presidency on a platform of sound money, low taxes and slashing government spending. Like me, he’s a follower of Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, whose “Man, Economy, and State” I first read at Hillsdale College, 1975-77.
But Millei needs to make one key policy change. Instead of switching the national currency to the U.S. dollar, he should return the Argentine peso to the gold standard.
The hazard is following the failed dollarization path Argentina tried two decades ago. As Ananya Bhattacharya wrote this week on Quartz, “Although Argentina hasn’t tried full dollarization, a ‘convertibility plan’ pegged its peso to the US dollar from 1991 to 2002 in an attempt to curb hyperinflation and fuel economic growth.
“It worked—until it didn’t.
“A decade on, ‘fiscal deficits and debt weren’t reined in’ and ‘Argentina lost external competitiveness. Growth collapsed while unemployment and the current account deficit soared,’ Mark Sobel, the US chair of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), wrote in August.”
It makes no sense to exchange one fiat currency for another.
The Yankee Peso
Although the dollar is not as inflationary as the peso, it’s still inflationary. According to the U.S. government’s own Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator, today it takes $754.10 to buy what $100 bought in August 1971. That’s the month President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard.
But that’s really an underestimate. According to John Williams’ ShadowStats.com, since the 1990s the government has rigged the numbers to underestimate inflation. Using the pre-Clinton algorithm, inflation is roughly twice what they’re telling us. Here’s a chart from his excellent site (Courtesy of ShadowStats.com):
Note the blue line showing the real CPI. It shows real inflation is around 12% in the United States, and was 17% last year. That’s obviously what all of us are paying at the grocery store, at the gas pump and for the mortgage or rent.
If we look at the dollar’s price in gold, it has soared from $35 an ounce in 1971, to $2,007 on Nov. 21, 2023. It’s worth just 1.7% what it was 52 years ago.
It would be a big mistake for Milei to import that chaos into Argentina. Adopting gold would be a better way to go.
