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NewsRescue
Argentina’s president-elect, Javier Milei, named former Wall Street stock trader Luis Caputo as the country’s economy minister on Wednesday.
Milei made the announcement on Radio La Red following a two-day trip to Washington, where he met with officials from the US Treasury and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Caputo, a former JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank executive, led Argentina’s Finance Ministry and, for a brief while, the central bank from 2017 to 2018. He is well-known for his connections to the Wall Street and Buenos Aires banking communities.
Last week, Caputo met with local and international bank officials to lay out Milei’s proposed “shock therapy” for Argentina’s beleaguered economy, which includes abandoning the peso in favour of the US dollar, eliminating the fiscal deficit, and closing the central bank.
Anker Latinoamerica, Caputo’s economic consulting firm, published a paper earlier this year stating that dollarizing Argentina would be “difficult,” but “not impossible,” and would necessitate “complex legal and financial architecture.”
Many analysts in the country have frequently warned that dollarization is hazardous and that the government should prioritise other economic reforms.
“It’s critical to solve problems with a lot of expertise, because if we make a mistake, we could end up with hyperinflation,” Milei said in the interview, alluding to the central bank’s short-term obligations held by local creditors totaling more than 23.8 trillion pesos ($66.2 billion).
Caputo, Argentina’s new economy minister, will also be faced with renegotiating the country’s controversial $43 billion IMF loan, on which the country has missed nearly all of its benchmarks this year.
