Nicolás Cachanosky

  Reversing populist legacies requires more than winning an election — or changing the policies. It requires rebuilding the institutions that populism spent years dismantling.   Elections end governments. They do not always end what those governments built. A previous post documented how populist rhetoric falls sharply when a populist government leaves office, while the economic and […]

  Elections are supposed to change things. And in one sense, they do: when a populist government loses power, the rhetoric changes almost overnight. The speeches shift in tone, the enemy-of-the-people framing disappears, and international observers breathe a collective sigh of relief. But rhetoric is not policy. And policy, it turns out, is far stickier […]

  Argentina has had more IMF programs than almost any country in history. The count depends on how one tallies arrangements, waivers, and extensions, but the number exceeds twenty. The pattern is consistent: a crisis, a program, initial stabilization, eventual collapse, and a return to the Fund. The standard explanations cycle through familiar territory — […]

  The IMF’s Board recently approved $1 billion in new disbursements to Argentina. The accompanying Staff Report and Selected Issues Paper are worth reading carefully — they are technically sophisticated, broadly fair to the Milei government’s achievements, and candid about the risks ahead. But they are also worth reading for a different reason: at several points, the documents’ own […]

The puzzle that keeps repeating Argentina has tried to stabilize its economy before. It has done so under military governments and democratic ones, under heterodox programs and orthodox ones, under economists who believed in markets and politicians who did not. Each episode produced a period of relative calm. Each period eventually ended the same way. […]