Argentina goes to the polls

Business Daily

BBC

Business

4.4 • 816 Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2023

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There are two candidates: one is the current economy minister who has a wealth of experience in power; the other is a maverick libertarian economist who wants to ditch the country’s currency, the peso, and strip the central bank of its ability to print money.

We speak to his senior economic advisor, and also to a wine producer from the western province of Mendoza, who tells us about the challenges of doing business in a country with two exchange rates, severe restrictions on imports, a heavy tax burden and a shrinking economy.

And we speak to voters in Buenos Aires about what they want from their next president in a nation which seems to lurch from one economic crisis to the next.

Picture: Composite image of Javier Milei (Credit: Luis Robayo/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock) and Sergio Massa (Credit: Tomas Cuesta/Reuters) in front of an Argentinian flag (Credit: Carl Recine/Reuters)

Presented and produced by Gideon Long

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sport, but not as you know it.
0:03.4	Yes, you're good enough.
0:04.7	We wish we could take you, but you're a girl.
0:08.1	Amazing sports stories from the BBC World Service.
0:11.5	The rules were holding her back.
0:13.9	So she would have to rewrite them.
0:16.0	Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
0:21.3	Hello, welcome to Business Daily with me, Gideon Long.
0:25.1	Today we're going to Argentina, which has a presidential election this Sunday, the 19th of November.
0:30.9	And it's all about the economy.
0:33.8	There are two candidates.
0:35.2	One of them, Javier Milley, is a libertarian right-wing economist
0:38.5	who wants to ditch the country's currency, the peso.
0:44.2	Nobody wants that repugnant paper, the peso, because it's the paper issued by Argentine politicians.
0:49.8	That paper isn't worth excrement. It's rubbish. It's not even useful as fertilizer.
0:54.5	The other candidate, Sergio Massa, is the current economy minister. He's a man with years of
1:01.8	experience in power, the ultimate career politician.
1:05.7	Sergio Masa has the DNA of a politician. When he was young, he wants to be a politician.
1:10.8	When everybody said, I want to be a soccer player, he wants to be a politician. When everybody said,
1:11.6	I want to be a soccer player, he wants to be a politician. Who might win on Sunday and how will
1:16.2	they deal with inflation of 140%? What will they do with the peso and the country's two different
1:22.5	exchange rates? The official one increasingly bears no relation to reality.
	...

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