Milei’s Motosierra Goes Global
Addison Wiggin / February 14, 2025
“I am encouraged that DOGE is calling attention to the long-standing problem I call the ‘unconstitutionality index’ — the lopsided ratio of rules issued by regulatory agencies compared to laws passed by Congress and signed by the president during a calendar year.”
—Wayne Crews, Competitive Enterprise Institute
February 14, 2025— The DOGE website is finally up and running. Although Elon Musk has been posting on X about various government programs, the site will publish a comprehensive “org chart” of the U.S. government.
For now, it’s incomplete. However, it does list over 16,000 offices that encompass a federal workforce of over 3 million.
Meanwhile, between canceled contracts and other measures, DOGE is closing in on over $100 billion in savings for taxpayers.
At the current rate, DOGE could hit its target of $1 trillion in annual savings. DOGE is running on the Argentina model of taking a chainsaw, not a scalpel, to government spending.
Argentina’s government spending was worse than that of the U.S. on a percentage basis. Lacking a global reserve currency like the U.S. dollar, Argentina had to print a lot of money to pay for all its government spending. That meant that annual inflation rates in the triple digits weren’t unheard of.
However, in just over a year, Javier Mieli has pushed through massive spending cuts, crushed a near-hyperinflationary level of money printing, and made the case of government by the people, for the people.
We’ve covered the Greatest Political Experiment of our Time in depth here and even noted his early accomplishments and scathing indictment of WEF’s socialist leaders in Davos 2024 in the latest edition of Empire of Debt. Milei torched “wokeism” again for 29 minutes straight at this year’s Davos event on January 23, 2025.
Honorary Grey Swan Investment Fraternity member Joel Bowman, who lives and writes from Buenos Aires, fills us in on Mieli’s success in the year. We’ll leave the compare and contrast with Musk’s approach to you. It is refreshing to have multiple examples of real-world efforts to reign in government corruption and condescension. Enjoy. ~ Addison
Chainsaw 2.0
Joel Bowman, Notes From the End of the World
Don’t look now, dear reader… but the deep cuts are still to come…
Here’s the man with the motosierra himself, Argentina’s president, Javier Milei (from X):
YOU’VE ALREADY MET THE CHAINSAW, NOW MEET CHAINSAW 2.0
Argentina has 27,000 laws in force, 70,000 executive orders, and 200,000 resolutions. We are going to ask each department of the state to make a list of the ones in use… and we’ll terminate the rest.
Sr. Milei went on to acknowledge that Argentines voted for him to lower inflation, lower poverty, grow the economy, and generally Make Argentina Great Again.
“And I am doing just that,” he concluded, vowing to redouble his efforts ahead of the country’s congressional elections, scheduled for October of this year.
Taking Sr. Milei’s points one at a time, one catches a glimpse of the wonders a free(r) market bestows upon a population patient and committed enough to endure the measures required to achieve it. Herewith…
We begin with Item #1 on Milei’s to-do list:
Lower inflation
Employing a series of bizarre economic policies – like balancing the budget by not spending money the government doesn’t have on things its citizens don’t need – Milei’s administration managed to drag his nation’s beleaguered peso back from the brink of hyperinflation.
Longtime Notes readers will recall that the monthly inflation rate stood at a knee-quivering 25.5% when Milei took office, in December of 2023…
And today?
Here’s USAID-funded newswire, Reuters, reporting the latest estimates, through firmly gritted teeth, this very morning…
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 13 (Reuters) — Argentina’s monthly inflation rate likely hit its lowest level since libertarian President Javier Milei came to power in late 2023, ushering in painful austerity measures, a Reuters poll of analysts showed ahead of data due on Thursday.
The consumer price index (CPI) likely rose 2.3% in the first month of 2025, according to the median estimate from 25 analysts polled by Reuters. If achieved, that would be down from 2.7% in December and mark the slowest monthly rise since the middle of 2020.
And here’s us, at the entirely independent, reader funded Notes From the End of the World, going to press with the updated figures, released at 4pm Thursday afternoon, Buenos Aires time:
Inflation here in Argentina slowed to 2.2% for the month of January, marking the lowest level since July, 2020, according to figures released from the National Institute of Statistics (INDEC):
Annualized inflation figures also fell considerably, down from a high of 289% in April of last year to 84.5% for January, 2025.
C’mon, mainstream lackeys… journalisming ain’t that hard!
Lowering inflation? Check.
Moving along then to Item #2 on Sr. Milei’s to-do list: Lower poverty
It will come as something of a surprise to money-printing Keynesians that the resulting inflation is actually – wait for it… – bad for an economy… especially those poor souls clinging desperately to the bottom rungs of the ladder, about whom our econo-PhD class so conspicuously pretend to care.
Government maximalists and Reuters “journalists” alike will therefore be shocked to discover that, as inflation down here on the Pampas has cooled from scorching to merely red hot, poverty too has declined in step.
According to the very latest data, released by INDEC and processed by the Torcuato Di Tella University (UTDT), poverty fell from 52.9% in the first half of 2024 (a hangover from the previous administration’s fiat print-a-thon) to below 40% in the second half of the year. From La Derecha Diario:
The poverty nowcast study, prepared by UTDT economist Martín González Rozada, estimates a rate of 36.8% for the July-December period, with a 95% confidence interval that ranges between 35.3% and 38.2%.
Here’s that graph, from UTDT:
Broken down further, the rate actually fell from 38.8% in Q3 to 34.8% for the fourth quarter, according to INDEC figures, which is the lowest level since 2019, before the previous administration proved itself a friend of poverty… and not of the poor.
Lowering poverty? Check.
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Now for Item #3 on Milei’s to-do list: Grow economy
As reported previously in these Notes, Argentina officially emerged from recession in the third quarter of last year, when gross domestic product (GDP) grew 3.9% in the July-to-September quarter compared with the previous three months. (That’s not an annualized figure, btw… that’s just for the quarter.)
On top of that, real salaries are outpacing inflation, delivering purchasing power back into the hands (and pocketbooks) of Argentine savers and consumers. In 2024, according to official data, salaries increased 145.5% against an inflation rate of 117.8%.
December’s real monthly gain, of 3.1%, marked the 9th consecutive month that salaries beat inflation. From INDEC:
While registered private sector wage growth handily surpassed public sector growth, at 2.8% and 1.7% respectively, the anarcho-capitalists among us (you know who you are!) will be delighted to hear that it was non-registered private sector wage growth that rocketed the most… quadrupling public sector growth to clock a massive 6.8% growth for the month (and almost 200% for the year).
Grow the economy? Check.
As for Item #4 on the to-do list, “Making Argentina Great Again,” that remains an ongoing project. Suffice to say, the chainsaw is off to a roaring start.
And the real deep cuts are still to come. ~ Joel Bowman, Notes From the End of the World
Regards,
Addison Wiggin,
Grey Swan
P.S. “Buckle up,” one of our researchers forwarded this comment from Threadreader this morning: “There’s a massive move happening in the gold market that almost nobody’s talking about. Huge physical deliveries. Shortages in London. Gold flowing into the U.S. at record levels. Someone with deep pockets is scooping up gold—likely the U.S. Treasury or Fed.
“The theory: They’re preparing for a full-on gold audit—meaning they’re re-shoring gold they might’ve leased out. Once audited, that gold could form the backbone of a new monetary system. This could signal a seismic shift in the dollar’s status and value.”
Andrew’s been hot on the case. Physical demand for bars remains at a premium, and signs continue to point to gold being moved into the Federal Reserve’s vault in Manhattan.
Is there a DOGE audit of America’s gold holdings on the horizon? If so, we expect gold prices to continue to soar higher as the metal has to be repatriated, making our recent gold price prediction seem timely. Stay tuned.
Send your comments to addison@greyswanfraternity.com