Among the many dialectical shocks Javier Milei offered us during his latest visit to New York, perhaps the most striking is contained in this brief paraphrase: “Life and good on one side, death and evil on the other. There is no third path. Do not be fooled. You either choose the good or you choose the evil. If we choose the good, we prosper. If we choose the evil, we sink. There is not much more to do. Everything is in our hands.” The old quote was refreshed and elevated for 21st-century politics at the Yeshiva Darchei Torah institute in Queens, where he received an award, yet it forms part of the epilogue of a book the nation’s president has been drafting at Olivos for several months. It is known that in that essay he will link economic development with theology, capitalism with paradise on Earth, and prosperity with spiritual obedience; he will not hesitate to deploy out of historical context manichean phrases and will, in fact, criticize colleagues who reduce everything to terms of economic efficiency and disdain divine considerations. That, apparently, coincides with libertarians.
The full text, already partially read to the ORT school students, also suggests that his relationship with God—so analgesic in earthly adversity—will enable him to decree where good and evil reside. This strong “religiosity” is a relatively new express fever for Milei, catching him in the middle of power and taking with the classic faith of converts. And, by the way, it is robbing him of a lot of time: we know that the serious study of biblical narratives tends to be oceanic and absorbing. Perhaps that explains why he has delegated political and administrative management to his sister, and all macroeconomics to Minister Luis Caputo and his beleaguered team. The Lion is today more than ever a man absorbed in himself and an obsessive reader laden with brusque mysticism: an intellectual needs silence. He governs, though, with high intensity and little Judeo-Christian mercy on his social networks, and from time to time he goes on world tours, albeit without the enthusiasm or clout of the early days. The Bloomberg TV interview, conducted without fear or filters, also left dialectical astonishments, especially when the journalist asked with broad freedom whether he worried about a recession, and the anarcho-capitalist messiah responded with playful indifference to the unusual applause of some em>groupies. The market’s immediate reaction was that country risk surpassed 600 basis points, though it would be unfair to say there were not also other global factors in that misfortune. Wall Street observers have not stopped noting, however, that economic activity fell 2.9% in July, marking the largest monthly contraction in six years: industry, commerce, and construction are on an unending slide. Industrial confidence fell in August: they report weak demand and looming layoffs, and metalworking production collapsed by 6.1% across nearly all sectors. Even mining, hydrocarbons, and finance—winners of the model—lost about 26,000 jobs since November 2023. Informality and self-employment grew, and it is estimated that each new precarious job pays less than half of a formal position. Poverty rose by 4.1 percentage points—about two million more Argentines—and reached 32.3% in the first half compared with the second half of 2025. Private wages barely beat inflation in the last thirty days after having fallen consistently throughout the season, and tariffs rose 7 points above that same index. Mass consumption fell 1.5% in August and accumulates a 2.7% drop, a trend clearly felt in supermarkets. Delinquency has not receded and has hit young people hardest, and investment fell 11% year-on-year.
The official response to all this mediocre performance was also disappointing: Caputo blamed the snowfalls, the rains of Ranchipur, and Messi’s World Cup. Since his boss did not fare well in the Bloomberg interview, La Derecha Diario accused the sharp interviewer of being “a British operator” and sought to cast Milei as having “humiliated” him with his eloquence. It is obvious that the doves of international finance do not quite share the inflated, marketing-driven optimism, nor the creative accounting of all these Argentinian spokespeople, and they do not place much trust in the path of an economy that has led to the closing of thirty thousand companies and which, as a consequence of all these woes, shows widespread social discontent in most polls. Nor in a country whose society is becoming dollarized—for travel and hoarding—at a dizzying pace. That dollarization process is not a trivial matter, but a transcendental symptom: last Sunday the columnist Jorge Liotti revealed, in an exemplary chronicle, how the tense weekend preceding the Scott Bessent bailout—“The day the Government peered into the abyss”—was evaluated in the Ministry of Economy for the reinstatement of the exchange controls. The Treasury Secretary, the next day, halted that catastrophe with a tweet minutes before markets opened: how could Milei not believe in sublime miracles? But the episode shows two more things: the solution they had found for that emergency and the complete absence of the President in the fine mechanics—technical and communicational—when the stakes were high.
Gita Gopinath, former deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund and a connoisseur of the Argentine market, this week praised Milei’s fiscal ax, but suggested tweaks to soften his program: “The Government is being much more cautious than it should be when it comes to buying dollars to bolster its reserves… It should allow the nominal exchange rate to move more. That, combined with a fiscal and monetary policy that avoids letting that depreciation spill directly into prices, will generate a certain depreciation of the real exchange rate. I think it’s important that they do it.” Perhaps Gopinath is mistaken, perhaps a brute, perhaps a damned Keynesian, or perhaps influenced by Satanic Marxism, but the truth is that she aligns with the view of many top local economists of unmistakably liberal ideology. Yet the Lion reads all such suggestions as challenges to his dogma and his prowess, and thus feels attacked in his narcissism. Any criticism is an offense. Messiah complex or inferiority complex? He prefers, anyway, those who whisper that he has already done all the work, that he should lash himself to the mast and wait for divine winds. “There is not much more to do,” he may recite with biblical spirit, but that is little more than comfortable folly: it is evident we are not passing through the promised “sixteen to eighteen months of the best in decades,” and the electoral campaign will not be “a walk in the park.” The Bilardista obsession with outcomes cannot be sacrificed on the altar of borrowed deities or mystical resignation or analgesic self-deception. Milei still has a year to prove that his model is not merely a projection of this dangerous misfortune. May God illuminate him.
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