1. Milei did not sell this as a memecoin at all, unlike Trump, he sold it as a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises".
2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well.
3. 80% of the marketshare was concentrated in just 10 accounts, these accounts made transactions at 0-1 seconds after the president's tweet. There was some clear insider training here.
Was Milei on this or was he just the victim of a scam? In either way he has pictures and met with the coin's creators 3-4 times as the record shows, so he cannot claim he knew nothing about this. I don't personally think he intended to be part of a scam, but it shows some clear incompetence and he cannot promote such things in his official account, scam or not.
I hope this helps people from outside Argentina get another view of Javier Milei, I've read way too many uninformed comments here on Hacker News and other sites about how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
This is a hasty generalization; while I agree on the fact that Milei was incompetent in promoting a memecoin as a financial instrument, that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden, nor that the things he has done for Argentina are inherently bad, it just means he was incompetent on this matter. I am painfully aware of how divided the country is on the current government and its actions, however that doesn't invite sweeping judgments based on a single event. Criticism should be specific and supported by broader evidence rather than assuming total incompetence from one mistake.
That may explain it but it does NOT excuse it or the consequences.
Smart people are also supposed to consider the consequences of their actions a bit more deeply than dumb people, and leaders are supposed to surround themselves with even smarter and more broadly experienced advisers to alert them to potential stupid actions and so moderate their actions to avoid harming others (as well as harming their own reputation or standing).
>>Hopefully he learns from this mistake. ...
Right: so just let smart people with a lot of power make whatever mistakes come along that damage others but face zero consequences for them beyond "we hope they learn".
That is an excuse for keeping incompetent autocrats or oligarchs in power, not a plan for a sustainable and growing complex society.
Milei should face whatever consequences apply in his country to any person loudly promoting a fraud with a large platform. But he probably will not, Such a lack of consequences should be recognized as a wrong, not merely dismissed with a shrug.
Sheesh
It will probably be dismissed.
The judiciary in Argentina is largely at the beck and call of Milei's political godfather, former president Mauricio Macri, who uses them to put pressure on his political enemies (largely kirchnerismo), and also makes them quietly drop most lawsuits against him or his allies.
Now, to be clear, it's Macri (not Milei) who has the courts in his pocket, and lately they have a strained relationship, because Macri wants better positions in government for his cadres, while Milei is instead poaching them for his own party. So it's very likely this whole mess will be just a way for Macri to remind Milei who's who, and get a few favors, after which the whole thing will go away.
I'd love to be wrong about this, and for Milei to face the music, but I don't think I'm wrong.
Worse. He's a terrible leader. Which is a bad trait for someone who leads a country.
Define bad, I'm sure the insiders who made millions selling Libra at the right time don't consider him bad. If he was involved in the scam, it wasn't a bad financial decision from his point of view (just a stupid political decision). Argentinian entrepeneurs don't consider him bad. Those waiting in line at the soup kitchens probably see it differently...
> Those waiting in line at the soup kitchens probably see it differently...
At least half those guys also approve of him. Thanks to his government's policies of reducing inflation and removing middlemen out of social assistance, those people can afford to sustain themselves, and poverty has gone back down to around 37% according to several private economists/universities.
Milei is not good for the people, and the inflation numbers are highly misleading because the cost in dollars is very high in Argentina right now. Plenty of people losing their jobs, factories closing (some with decades of existence in Argentina), plenty of people begging on the streets.
A lot of people who support him do so out of antiperonist feelings (which has a very strong tradition in Argentina), even as he makes their lives harder or they have to close their businesses due to Milei-induced crises.
It turns out it doesn't take much to appear to be an economic genius - just stop spending money the government doesn't have and get rid of onerous market regulations (eg. rent controls).
I'm in support of social spending to support those in need, but it's clear Argentina was moving ever-further away from being able to sustain that kind of discretionary spending as a country. They need to get their house in order first.
That shows quite the misconception about what "money" actually is.
However, Argentina has runaway second order effects like inflation that must be dealt with, and we know that the only real way to deal with that is to depress the money supply. They will have to deal with the pain in order to repair the rest of the economy; it'll suck initially, but it'll improve outcomes everywhere else, and that should outweigh the effects of reduced government spending before too long.
There's no rational beyond blind faith here. Inflation will eventually stop, most likely, but thinking that “because of the sacrifice, things will go better in the end” is just magical thinking.
The economy doesn't give a shit about morality, and Germans are paying the price of this belief at this very moment: they put their moral take about debt (“Schuld”, which also means “guilt”) in their Constitution in 2009 and now they are stuck in a recession with no end in sight because the government cannot support their economy, and they also bullied the whole Europe into reducing their debt during the 2010s, which lead to catatonic growth level in the EU for a decade.
When economics policies are decided on a moral basis with religious-inspired arguments it leads to disaster (and it's true no matter what moral values are driving it: Mao starved his population for the exact same reason, even though the moral values that inspired his policies weren't the same).
The literal thing that happens is your country starts spending a greater and greater proportion of revenue servicing its debt (and eventually defaults), but this is less snappy to say.
[1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-worl...
I do agree that the relative value of the US economy shot up directly due to the destruction the war brought to European, Chinese, Japanese, and USSR industry and populations - so if you were discussing things in this sense, I can agree.
All that knowledge and redirected output ended up being extremely profitable once it could be used for civilians instead of the military when the war ended.
There's no need to adhere to a particular economic theory (I'm not particularly familiar with MMT) to realize that, at societies scale, money isn't some kind of scarce commodity.
[0] Unless you believe in MMT
> stop spending money the government doesn't have
Which has nothing to do with your response.
I think simplistic statements "government should not spend money it doesn't have" or "government should stop spending so much money" are all just the normal average person's way of trying to phrase this fundamental economic truth that anyone with a working brain can intuit.
It's obvious that governments cannot just spend any arbitrary large amount of money without consequence.
It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much easier to overspend than to underspend.
So constant calls for governments to go on monetary diets and "make better food choices" are clearly warranted.
There Is Always a Well-Known Solution to Every Human Problem—Neat, Plausible, and Wrong
> It's also obvious to anyone, that just like eating too many calories, it's much eadier to overspend than to underspend.
You accidentally came up with the best possible illustration for the topic, and it's a really good illustration that actually goes against your argument:
- If you eat too much, you'll get fat and unhealthy.
- If you eat too little, you'll die from starvation.
And you're right, it's exactly the same for government spending: if the government spends too much, it's not good, but if it's spends too little the economy's dead.
Or does that already exist, I just don't know it?
Maybe it's not just one-dimensional though, i.e., it could matter where exactly spending occurs.
It's pretty obvious that some uses of money are more useful than others - if the state spent large amounts of money on buying snow and storing it in the sun, that's not going to have the same kind of effect as spending the exact same amount of money on building new roads. But beyond obviously silly examples, no one can really agree on even the basics of the effects of government spending in other areas.
For example, a question like "if the government pays very large pensions and social aids, does that increase the economy as much as spending the same amount of money on subsidizing private business?" is extremely divisive in economic circles - with opposing schools of economics claiming opposite results as the "obvious scientific answer".
Also I'd say the balanced budget "extreme" is more directly analogous to maintaining a balance of calories in versus out, not starvation.
Germany put it recently into their constitution that new debt is strictly limited, literally called the "debt brake". That overlooks all the nuances you just explained and in the worst case can cripple the German economy. German politics is full of folks demanding the "black zero", meaning essentially no (new) state debt. It's the literal sense, not the metaphorical sense that you are describing. And people buy it, since that's how their household economy works too. They even have a metaphor for that ("schwäbische hausfrau").
It's terrible. The debt brake is just as bad for their economy as the "rent lid" that's very popular among the German left which is crippling their housing sector.
I would go into more depth, but I find there are a lot of people that just fundamentally have different views on economics XD
Installed industrial capacity at its lowest, real cost in USD through the roof, large corporations that have been around for _decades_ shutting down because of a lack of demand, the shutdown of government programs for vaccine distribution and HIV immune therapy, the complete and absolute mismanagement around forest fires, and the lowest spending in science in the past 20 years.
There is not a single metric in which the country is better off. A couple bankers and mining corporations are doing great. For everyone else, the cost of living is unbearably high and productivity low.
No one says it's going to be all sunshine and roses, but fixing inflation and housing/rental prices seems like a pretty solid start, as well as moving towards eliminating a currency peg.
Argentinians disagree.
"The percentage of Argentines who say their standard of living is getting better (53%) has inched above the majority level for the first time since 2015." https://news.gallup.com/poll/654089/javier-milei-argentina-c...
"Argentina's monthly inflation rate dropped to 2.2% in January, its lowest since mid-2020 after libertarian President Javier Milei took office just over a year ago ushering in austerity measures that have helped stabilize the embattled economy." https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-inflation-r...
Compared to before Milei, costs are completely high and people who could live with their (now considered low) income are barely surviving.
You can say he's fixing it, but at the same time pretty much driving almost the whole population into poverty. And then the next president will have to deal with it and probably undo whatever Milei did. It's unsustainable.
> 211.4%
https://apnews.com/article/argentina-inflation-december-annu...
2024?
> 117%
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/economy/indec-reveals-argent...
Has inflation been high over at least 2 years?
Yes.
Has it gone done by almost half?
Yes.
According to private economists/universities, poverty is around 37%, which is even lower than we he started to rule, we will have to wait for official statistics in March I believe.
The important thing is that outsiders are falsely believing that the problem with this country is high inflation instead of low economic productivity. The country has dealt with high inflation for a century and during that time has the highest standard of living of Latin America and a solid middle class.
What Milei is doing is literally regressing in the public infrastructure needed to develop industry while keeping structural costs artificially high. Mark my words: very little will have been accomplished inflation wise but industrial activity will drop permanently as factories that cannot handle high costs leave.
What Milei is doing: he's giving up on Argentinian Peso and adopting the USD as de-facto currency.
This is a political move, giving up national sovereignty in exchange of getting Argentina closer to the USA and away from Latin America. It's no coincidence Trump and Elon Musk are praising the Argentinian president.
Perhaps he did slow down the inflation a bit, sure, but it's easy to cut government spending when you are basically going into debt with your citizens, not paying government salaries, government contracts, etc. Pretty much everyone in the public scientific or health sector has seen their purchasing power slashed to half, and some of those haven't been paid for a couple of months either.
Nowadays, buying food costs almost R$120 ($20 in todays rate).
Inflation can be stable, but cost of living has gone through the roof for almost a decade now, and Milei managed to speedrun it to a point that a lot of Argentinians are below the line of poverty.
Your local currency having a crazy valuation after your country just fixed hyperinflation isn't anything new. It's kinda of an obligatory stage. It can get fixed quickly enough if you remove the foreign exchange restrictions.
As always, how the government reacts now to solve all the disparity that high inflation created is what will tell it's a good government or not. The disparities being there right now isn't... But odds are that now his government will terminate before he can do any real work there.
Argentina is very presidentialist and personalist, so everyone thinks this is Milei's doing, but most of the economic measures are done by people from other political party (PRO), with plans that were in the working for at least 2 years for it's candidates. They have nothing to do with what Milei campaigned with.
If he doesn’t succeed, it’s hard to see how the Austrian school of economics can continue. With heavyweights such as George Selgin endorsing Milei’s performance to date, it’s going to require some very adept use of the reverse gear if things are subsequently judged not to have panned out as planned (which appears to be the typical outcome of other attempts to apply this school of thought throughout history).
The world does seem very accepting of the current increased poverty levels in Argentina - “it’s always been this way”, “it was just under reported before” etc etc. Maybe.
From a purely human point of view I hope they succeed. The timing could be excellent for them, a Return to prosperity given the current global situation wrt world order and demographics could conceivably put Argentina in a very advantageous position economically?
I have grave reservations about the social science called economics though, well specifically “macro economics”. I worry that this experiment just leads to even more suffering.
just to point it, but he isn't applying much of the Austrian ideas in Argentina. The stuff he ends-up doing tends to be out-right run of the mill monetarism. He didn't do anything new or revolutionary.
Do the Austrian school economists even have ideas that can be applied as a shock, like what you can do in a single year?
It doesn't have to be based in reality. They can just roll out the same argument as "true communism has never been tried", but from the right.
Ultimately Argentina never recovered from the collapse in value of being a food exporter. They're never going to recover until they can sort out the good old balance of payments problem. Doing so is going to be unavoidably uncomfortable as imports get relatively really expensive.
Define "current increased", last data I can find from El País [1] - which is a leftist source - and I have seen repeated in many other outlets - Argentinian and international - is that poverty has seen a sharp decrease in the second half of 2024, and is the same as pre-Milei levels.
[1] https://elpais.com/argentina/2024-12-21/milei-celebra-una-ba...
... Not sure about that; it's not like it has had many success stories, and it somehow manages to chug along.
But the school is also a spectrum. If you watch interviews with Hayek, he's quite pragmatic in some ways; he concedes that some social programs can be desirable, particularly around heathcare, but pushes that such programs should be as market oriented as possible. He's also fine with taxes on negative externalities, like pollution.
Von Mises, who many consider the father of the movement, was extremely rigid and uncompromising in his classical economics view and how government should be minimal (though being jewish and watching the nazis operate greatly influence this viewpoint). Add to the fact that much of the modern torch has been carried by American advocates who were heavily influenced by Murray Rothbard (who was a student of Mises and can best be described as anarcho-capitalist through and through) and the whole movement has took a nosedive off the crazy tree.
IMO the movement is now mostly made up of people who at best can no longer see the forest for the trees and at worst are bigoted or terrible people who can't stand that "the government" won't let them do terrible things. I've literally seen videos of Rothbard disciples advocate for debtors bondage/slavery, child labour, and even worse things.
As in three days before Trump's inauguration? And then $MELANIA the day before? Yes, absolutely no obvious ethical violation there (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-new-crypto-coin-spar...).
> The companies behind the Trump token, CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC, co-owned by CIC Digital, collectively own 80% of the tokens, meaning that Trump-linked businesses could have gained $8 billion worth of crypto over the weekend.
Is there any evidence that LIBRA can do that? If not it's even more scammy.
Who gives a shit? Let's stop pretending that utilising the word 'meme' in any sort of associative context is some airtight legal defense against this being a lowest common denominator scam. These are both absolutely illegal and disgusting acts that aim to rob people of their money, using the word meme does not absolve Trump from anything.
https://youtu.be/EqizJTbxAEM?t=3241
One of the co-creators of Libra coin reveals that insiders were able to buy into $TRUMP at $500m at a "special access" private dinner in DC, before it went public. He also reveals he was involved in Melania coin too.
Nobody really should. This is just to make the scam more obvious to Milei's shrinking supporters.
Milei and his closest circle are now stuck in a loop, trying to argue simultaneously that "$LIBRA and cryptocurrencies are just a gamble, a casino for very technical people", "this only affected a minority of crypto gamblers", and that "he wanted to spread the word about a project that could be good for Argentina".
Anyone with a gram of brain matter can tell these assertions are incompatible.
And yes, one of the co-creators of $LIBRA candidly said the way these things work, only insiders make money, and the rest loses. He claims he's upset by "insider trading" being considered a naughty thing, when it's "the way these things work".
Before anyone asks: I've watched all the interviews, with Milei, his economy minister Caputo, and this Davis guy. Not hearsay, they are literally saying all these things now.
It'll be hard to argue Milei is such a savvy guy now (he often makes a show of calling his opponents "econochantas" -- slang for "econo-fraudsters"). And now he's proven himself to be either a bumbling fool, a scammer, or both. A losing proposition for anyone trying to defend his actions.
Okay, so please cite a few more examples of how his economic policies are so terrible in so many ways, particularly compared to the literal decades of economic mismanagement under most of the country's previous governments, and their largess for the sake of garnering supporters.
>If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
Any leader can make a blunder on something or another, even one managing an otherwise complex but possibly successful economic plan. How about an explanation of how incompetent his government is on other matters instead of asking people to "imagine"?
Given the kinds of policies previous Argentine governments regularly enacted, i'd be willing to forgive something like this, and I'd mistrust the ideology behind your reasoning if you can know about the political history of the country while putting special emphasis on this particular apparent scam.
Don't be ridiculous. Decades of abysmal government in Argentina is damn important in any conversation about its current administration.
Not ruling it out, but it’s just as possible that there are bots analyzing the X accounts of leaders and other notable people to jump in front of any such actions.
Would simply be a matter of parsing for something that looks like a token address or links to the same. Buck shot some small amount that is sure to balloon when it actually hits. You’ll get burned by scams and account hijacks, but just one payoff would surely cover it all.
Nah. Leaders and other notable people don't go around talking about niche subjects for no reason at all. It's way more likely that whoever made the transaction caused Milei talking about the coin (by whatever means you want to imagine, usually notable people accept money to promote things, but as much as Milei sound stupid enough to think he can do that as president - what is already a crime - I still expect it to be worse).
Also, there is the clear relationship between him and the coin creators.
Some businessmen and entrepreneurs (or shady kinds of guys calling themselves so, anyway) are already denouncing Milei (or his close representatives, like his sister Karina, nicknamed "the boss") demanded money in exchange for favors / photo ops / etc. These are guys who have photos with him, not random strangers.
I think there's little doubt Milei is dirty, for all his talk denouncing the "political caste".
If relying on multiple clones of his dead dog, that he also named after libertarian philosophers, to give him policy advice as President didnt tip anyone off, I dont think shilling a meme coin rug pull is going to change their minds
His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.
Inflation is still far higher than it was 15 years ago without contractive policies that are destroying the industrial fabric of the country, and the local understanding of economist that actually know a thing or two is that there is inflationary inertia that will not be solved by the current policies.
> the economy is growing
By no means is the economy growing; industrial capacity is down. The nominal price of goods is going up and the cost of living is going up which appears in some metrics as more money moving in the economy, alebeit for drastically lower production as the real price in US dollars has doubled across every product line. The indexes that show progress use outdated purchasing baskets.
> percentage of poor people is down
Poverty went drastically up at the beginning of his mandate and still has not recovered baseline values. Most poverty indicators continue to undercount the impact of the cost of food, medical insurance and services, which hit poor homes disproportionately. This can be observed by the fact that medicine and food consumption are the categories whose consumption has been hit the hardest.
> salaries are up
Registered salaries using indices that have no accomodated for the changes in inflationary inertia are not very useful. [Consumption, however, is the lowest it's been in 20 years with no sign of recovery](https://www.infobae.com/economia/2025/01/15/el-consumo-masiv...).
> For nearly 40 years, Argentina’s poverty level had consistently hovered above 25 percent. But since the far-right Milei took office on December 10, 2023, that figure has skyrocketed.
When he started, the poverty index was around 40%, not 25%. Then it peaked to almost 55%, but now they claim it has descended to around 40% again (It's probably down, but I'd wait a few months for confirmation.).
Also, from 2007 to 2015 the numbers were heavily cooked, so take that period with a grain of salt.
And in ~1990 we had an hyperinflation, that may skew the average in weird ways.
> But two months ago, their rent mushroomed from 90,000 Argentinian pesos to 150,000 — a leap from roughly $88 to $148. It was beyond their ability to afford.
We had a heavy rent control, so most apartments were out of the market and it was difficult to find one.
For some time it was ilegal to raise the rent and the inflation was 100% yoy. So a contract for two years used to say something like you have to pay an average of AR$75K, but only AR$50K during the first year and AR$100 during the second year. So no "rise", only a weird paying scheme.
Also, to renew it, you must pay the new market rate, but the inflation was 200% yoy instead of the predicted 100% yoy. So the new prize was AR$150K and AR$300K (with an average of AR$225K).
(IIRC there were some changes to allow increments that follow the inflation index, but only every 6 months. With an inflation rate of 250% yoy, that means that every 6 months your rent double overnight.)
So IMO it's not outdated, but the numbers are cherry picked and are difficult to understand if you never lived with a 200% yearly inflation.
I am however, still going to mock obviously bat shit insane ideas, and telepathically speaking with your cloned dogs for policy advice is absolutely bat shit insane
He apparently did clone his dogs but can you point to the source material (in this case Milei) about speaking with them telepathically?
This just sounds super made up.
I've listen to his interview with Lex F. and his WEF speech and he sounded like a principled free market advocate. Not a single thing he said was crazy so I wonder where did you get this factoid.
Milei has certainly been smeared as right-wing so I wouldn't be surprised with other smears as well.
He's said so in speeches I've listened to. He claims his dog Conan (deceased) gives him advice from the Beyond. You can also google the myriad of interviews with him that mention this (and note: not all of them are critical, some found this touch of craziness endearing!).
He also claims his dogs (all clones of his revered Conan) are his "children", because they are the only "people" -- along with his sister -- "who will not betray him". Note that very few people have seen these dogs alive (very few recent photos or videos), and there's concern they may also be providing him comfort from "the Great Beyond". He gets enraged if people question him about this.
The guy is mentally unstable.
> Milei has certainly been smeared as right-wing so I wouldn't be surprised with other smears as well.
Sadly, in this case the truth is stranger than fiction.
Do you live in Argentina? Because none of this is actually true.
Look at the other side of the coin, too: his policies are authoritarian, he's dismantling science and industry, he's becoming like a religious leader automatically aligned with the US in whatever random things Trump says (e.g. attempting to leave the WHO just because Trump claimed he would do so).
Lots of poor people begging on the streets for a country where "the percentage of poor people is down". Also, this percentage is compared to the previous administration, which wasn't very good and also went through the COVID pandemic.
He's also been sacking close associates left and right, not exactly a sign of a competent government that inspires confidence.
> salaries are up and so on
This is false, but also, the cost of living is going up. Oh, "inflation" won't show you this, but the actual cost in dollars will.
Regarding 3 it seems clear to me that he was not an insider, but he was scammed into spending his political capital and reputation.
As a whole, it's classic cargo cult situation,imitating what a more powerful country is doing without understanding the nuances.
- They can continue claiming their all-knowing leader is an "expert" in everything under the sun. But this means he was an insider! And therefore, he committed a crime.
Or,
- They can claim he was duped in the silliest way possible. I mean, $LIBRA had every possible red flag and anyone with half a brain could tell it was a meme coin. So, that must mean Milei is not as intelligent as his closest followers claim.
Also, he, the president of Argentina, claimed he promoted the meme coin because "he wasn't aware of the details". If he wasn't aware of the details, why did he promote it? Will he also promote random miracle cures? Or only if -- as some people are already claiming -- some money is passed under the table?
lmao, where is the great take?
Regardless of whether this was marketed as as memecoin or a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" they are fundamentally the same thing - a fucking scam. This is equivocal to the amount of effort you would put in to polishing a turd - it doesn't matter as the end result is exactly the same.
What makes it worse is that you'd expect that the Incumbent President of the free world to be held to a higher standard. Not only that, but one of the co-creators of Libra coin has revealed that insiders were able to buy into $TRUMP at $500m at a "special access" private dinner in DC, before it went public. He also reveals he was involved in Melania coin too.
You lack the gift of nuance, your axiom is crypto=bad, so you are not seeing any difference between what the coin was technically and how it was sold, and that very difference is the basis of fraud.
A "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises" would be a completely legitimate enterprise, it implies that whatever money is deposit will go towards that purpose.
I heard the trump thing and it's hearsay for now. They are two different cases, Trump didn't suggest it was an actual investment vehicle, also he did it out of office.
No, I lack patience for obvious bullshit, and to even attempt to defend such an obvious grift is genuinely pathetic.
> Trump didn't suggest it was an actual investment vehicle, also he did it out of office.
Let me paraphrase: "Trump said it was a scam up-front, so therefore he's absolved of any responsibility for it being a scam. Trump announced his scam three days before his SECOND inauguration, therefore there is no conflict of interest or abuse of power."
Oh, could he be a lot further from the truth! He could have done at least a couple of orders of magnitude worst with inflation (it was 300% and rising in its peak last year, expected to be 25% this year: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-economy-see...). In the same link, economy is growing/expected at 4.5% this year. The government is at a surplus. The interest rate the state pays on its debt is 29% which looks incredibly high until you see this data: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/interest-rate . Yes, that was a 126% interest when Milei got there. In fact, it is a miracle that Argentina didn't default this year, as they had to do the biggest repay in three years (https://buenosairesherald.com/economics/argentina-pays-us4-3...).
> If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters.
This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does", which can't be further from the truth, and is behind some people falling in traps like the sunk cost fallacy ("I can't be wrong about this and cut loses, or people will think I'm wrong about everything"), or insufferable people that double down on their mistakes or enter a train of lies, and would do almost anything except accept they were wrong.
We have had these projections for every government since 2001 that have been sheer conjecture just like in 2017. This means nothing.
> This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does"
Is is obvious that you have never seen the man tweet or be interviewed about anything of substance. He is a sheer, utter moron, who holds a fake doctorate from a degree mill and master's from a third-rate university that is notorious for being singled-out in hiring applications that explicitly exclude its graduates for how bad it is.
I have seen said applications when looking at job boards in the early aughts.
The University of Buenos Aires and a few other national public universities are considered by all to be the most prestigious, along with the private universities of Instituto Di Tella and the ITBA. Lesser national universities rank second along with specific degrees from some private unis. Then you have several tiers of private universities.
The UB looks good externally because it’s the school for rich kids who don’t have the chops for public uni, as such it invests its money in nice facilities and exchange programs, while its research shines by its absence and it’s really not harder than high school even for STEM degrees, due to its ridiculously low bar.
I know your type: you throw bold assertions left and right, without a single source to back up. When somebody ask for sources you reply "trust me bro". You back up your assertions with "I never met anyone from Belgrano" (I never met anyone from MIT or Harvard, yet I thing they are good Universities) or "there are no famous people from Belgrano"... well, turns out that Milei is very famous and from Belgrano, so your argument falls apart.
But the whole point (Miley is bad because his University is bad) is invalid. You can study at MIT and be mediocre. You can study at a mediocre University and be top notch. Heck, you can even almost fail at high school and be excellent at your work. Dan Luu, University of Wisconsin after nearly failing high school come to mind, or John Carmack (two semesters at University of Misouri before dropping out, after a sentence of one year in a juvenil home). Guess they are bad at their job, according to your standards. Talk about elitism...
You ask from us a full "believe me because I say so, ignore whatever data you might find that contradicts me, I won't explain why nor point you to alternative sources. Just everything that doesn't agree with me is tainted, manipulated, or wrong. And if you don't have a degree in one of the best 100th Universities in the world and I can't find your research, you are unworthy". Nah, I'm not debating in those terms.
PS. Just noticed this:
> [...]considered by all to be the most prestigious, along with the private universities of Instituto Di Tella and the ITBA[...]
Did you know that Milei got his second Master at Instituto Di Tella? Guess he is elite now, by your own standards!
> Did you know that Milei got his second Master at Instituto Di Tella? Guess he is elite now, by your own standards!
He did not _finish_ the master at all. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/cultura/otro-dato-academico-impr...
He is a fraud. His thesis is plagiarized wholesale. He is an absolute moron addled on mood stabilizers as has been said by everyone who knows him.
Just look at him in one of the _very few unscripted interviews he's had_ . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcpAtBNzQEQ
I consider now that the country was already being set back for decades.
I like seeing statistics, not arguing emotionally.
There are a lot of things I don't like about Milei: this memecoin event is bad, but so is his political friendship with open self declared fascists, him being a libertarian. He is a populist. But about macroeconomics he is doing, at least, good. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge that minimum is simply a hater that doesn't want an honest debate. You can even argue that he did good at macro but bad at micro, and there is a debate. But to call the man "sheer utter moron" in macroeconomics is just wrong.
You are just argueing with the fallacy ad personam: instead of explaining us what policies were moronic, you say "the guy is a moron" and pretend that is enough to have a debate? And then you resort to the fallacy of association: Milei went to this University. I say this University is bad. Then Milei is also bad. Even 20 years after leaving the University and working in innumerable places (among them senior economist at HSBC), or authoring many academic papers. Turns out that https://www.topuniversities.com places the University of Belgrano at 465 best in the world: not impressive, but still of the 132 listed Universities of Latin America Belgrano is ranked the 18th.
If it is third rate and blacklisted, what about the next 114 Universities in the rank?
You can look at these numbers and say it's an improvement, but half of the population is still considered poor and the rate at which it's decreasing is not fast enough to consider Milei as a "genius".
Health insurance prices have tripled and household services more than doubled. Basic foodstuffs are now more expensive than they are in developed countries; a pack of pasta is cheaper Costco than a local supermarket.
This is said by no one except Milei. No serious economist has claimed that we were going towards a hyperinflation. I have lived through hyperinflationary periods and that was not it.
It is _trivial_ to disable inflation if you’re willing to wreck an economy.
I’m sorry I have no intention to reply to this because you’re just making stuff up. Milei has not published a single academic paper and has been credibly accused by many of plagiarism. His h-index is 0. His doctorate is from a degree mill. University metrics are easy to game and about as useful as the Top 50 restaurants in the world. While you’re at it tell me where all those famous academics in UB are, because in years of perusing computer science academia in Argentina I literally never ran into one.
https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Javier...
He's not a great researcher, because he was not a researcher! He was more of a consultant, and published from time to time until around 2016, when he switched to another type of job.
"A few hours ago I posted a tweet, as I have so many other times, supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever," Milei wrote. "I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet)." quote from Milei.
The big problem is that people might (or might not) buy crypto based on tweets. No shadow falls over Milei here, one of the true geniuses of our life time! He has done so much for Argentina, freeing it from socialism, and I won't stop until the last remnants and traces of socialism has been eradicated from the argentine psyche.
Then argentina will rise as a great financial power, built on solid capitalist and libertarian values.
I think there will be a lot of brain drain from the socialist EU to Argentina in a few years time. The question is if Argentina would want to receive the millions of refugees from the EU?
Tell me you don't live in Argentina without telling me you live in Argentina.
In reality, Milei is wrecking our country. Very high cost of living, poor people begging on the streets, inflation kept low at the cost of depressing the economy and wrecking our industry, factories closing down, etc. It's not hard to keep inflation low if you're willing to destroy the country.
And, you know, being involved in crypto-scams. But that's just the cherry on top. Maybe his dead dog Conan told him to do it, or so his medium told him. (Yes, he does speak to his dead dog via a medium, not making this up).
When this $Libra token launched, everything else dumped as capital flowed into it, and then effectively got siphoned off by insiders. So even people that didn't chase "Argentina's coin" got screwed. Rinse, lather, repeat. There are some winners in this game, mostly insiders and cabals, but a whole bunch of losers.
I would say something's gotta give, but the stark reality is that America's casinos are always jampacked with dream chasers.
It is much worse than that, legitimate gambling is fine.
In meme coins everyone knows they are scamming and and it is a pump and dump but just think that there would be some dumb "bag holder".
In one of the first talks we went to, the panel speaker mentioned that Trump pumping-and-dumping his memecoin was a good thing, because that more or less justifies their own position in doing so, and that it would maybe lower their legal fees in the future. This was followed by a big laugh from the audience.
These people fully know what they are doing.
If you know the rules of the game and you willingly participate, then how is it different from any casino?
I don't buy into any of the people that claim they were scammed, they knew the rules and they tried to make money out of nothing. Other than perhaps trading unregulated securities, I don't see the actual fraud.
To be clear it is distinct from pretending to be a security for an actual productive company, that is actual fraud, but usually the coins are very transparent about having no underlying value.
If _everyone_ playing the game knew the rules, no-one would play. Like all fraudulent schemes, these are fundamentally dependent on getting in new marks.
These memecoins are essentially partially open Ponzi schemes; there are the organisers (occupying essentially the Charles Ponzi role), the naive marks (occupying the same role as the marks in a conventional Ponzi scheme), but in the middle you have the gamblers, the people who are _aware_ that it's a fraud, but also aware that if they get in at the right time they can take some money off the marks and the gamblers who misjudge their time of entry.
(To _some_ extent this dynamic exists in some conventional Ponzi and pyramid schemes; "this is obviously a fraud, but if I get in early I might be one of the winners" is a game that has been played before. Meme coins have really turned it up to 11 tho)
There's always people that are ok with gambling and losing on the long run.
But there's people that recognize the zero sum, and bet that they are the ones having the advantage.
It's not like people bought the coin thinking they were helping the country, only conmen trying to outcon the conner bought it.
Although there definitely is an argument for tricking laypeople, I think it was just crypto traders and kids speculating on a coin.
It's very common in cons for the mark to think they are the conmen I hear.
Does this mean cigarettes are a good thing? Why do they exist in society if they so clearly harm people?
There's a big industry around smoking that has managed to perpetuate itself in society despite the fact that it causes harm. This doesn't mean there's a good reason reason for it to exist; the reality of the situation is that you can entrench yourself in society and become very difficult to remove if you have enough power to do so. It might be that in 100 or 200 years the cigarette industry is finally gone.
Pretty much the same applies to Casinos. Yes, people play at them, and a lot of people that go to Casinos have a gambling addiction. For some, perhaps most, casinos provide a degree of entertainment that is not really a problem but ultimately Casinos are set up as a business that relies on people losing more money than they win. There's things like lotteries which seek to channel gambling addiction into social good.
And even in this scenario; Casinos are highly regulated. Which crypto ponzis are not. The existence of crypto gambling is simply a failure of regulation which is slow to adapt to new technologies. Yeah, crypto bros are in luck that there's an administration that goes as far as to encourage people to fall for these scams. It doesn't mean it's something that's going to last.
However there is and should be a legal difference between selling tobacco to unknowing customers, like in unlabeled soda or ice creams, against selling to cigarette buyers who are informed.
Similarly security laws are in place to protect legitimate investments, the courts do not want to be involved in inproductive speculative trades. You need to have some nuance between speculative casino games and genuine trading.
You can't treat both cases the same, if you do you do it at the expense of genuine commerce.
In this case, it crossed over to the criminal kind because it passed as an investment security, and was sold as such. So I do backtract in what I said in my original comment, I do see how THIS is a crime, but not other stuff like say, other typical pump.fun coins. Mostly because I learned a bit more about the case.
Neither do many of the people who say such a thing here. Instead they regurgitate classic HN talking points around crypto without really considering their logic.
Simple example: calling something like bitcoin a "ponzi scheme" when it's literally run by nobody in particular and has no specific fraudulent promotion being done by its administrators (since there are none) for the sake of personal gain through redirected funds.
1- high reward to early adopters 2- needed to be shared to have value
Although I will make the important distinction that the asset doesn't lose value once it can no longer be shared, which is typical of pyramid schemes. Quite the contrary, it reached critical mass and gained first mover monopoly
I feel pyramid schemes are just a special kind of pump-and-dump scheme, and I don't understand how these aren't being punished effectively and swiftly by the existing laws and enforcement agencies...
I can’t believe people are still falling for these claims. Every single time someone launches a coin with claims that purchasing it will help fund some special cause, there is no basis to the claim.
If you want to fund or finance a cause, give your money to that cause. If you buy a meme coin, you’re only giving your money to insiders who held the coins before the pump.
For all the outrage, I yet have to see a single person in Argentina produce a TXHASH that proves they put money on the project. This is not something you can just log in on Binance and buy with cash in a single click. Meanwhile, states operate their own lotteries and casinos (e.g. "Lotería de la Provincia") where the poor and hopeful go to pay a tax on their ignorance.
Of course, the president and his advisors are responsible for not investigating enough and blindly trusting these so-called "businessmen". We'll see what the Law has to say about that, but I remind you that Argentina is a place where a vice-president tried to steal a company (look up Ciccone Calcográfica).
Last, the 4.4B number looks huge, but that is just "market cap", i.e. valuation extrapolated to the total supply of tokens, and not the actual amount of money that went into the coin.
Normally people here (arg) don't follow politicians they don't like on X. It's probable that most argentines that put in any money were his own followers. Among those, there were very well known influencers that actually did complain about the whole issue saying they lost money but they later deleted their posts (Fran Fijap, for example). I agree that a very sizeable portion of people that "invested" seem to be foreigners, though.
Milei's governmental structure is a very vertical one, they even expect para-official influencers to not criticize anything the government does.
You would've definitely been able to buy it with cash and a few clicks, for example using moonshot. (And I'm sure a couple other / similar platforms)
People lost money but I doubt there was much collateral damage
Older people have seen one hyperinflation, a few high inflation periods, sudden jumps in prices, perhaps two or three bank runs followed by confiscation of the deposits exchanged for long term bonds, and I may be missing a few "interesting" events. They don't trust anybody anymore.
So, it's OK to participate and promote a memecoin rugpull if they're not from your own country?
My introduction to it was at a local mall here. A person just approached and me and I politely said "I don't want it" assuming it was the credit cards or donations and he chuckled and said "sir, it's not credit cards" but I kept moving and then he pointed me to that creepy looking shiny globe/round thing. The moment I saw "Sam Altman" mentioned on a print-out kept there, I couldn't run faster out of there. I later read about it and found out this time around the creepy bugger was out scanning everyone's iris.
I think there are many types of scams after all. Good scam, bad scam, legit scam, illegitimate scam et cetera.
Cryptocurrency 'pig butchering' scam wrecks Kansas bank, sends ex-CEO to prison for 24 years
The massive embezzlement led to the collapse and FDIC takeover of Heartland Tri-State, one of only five U.S. banks that failed in 2023.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/cryptocurrenc...
I'd blame the bank staff just as much as the CEO. No controls, signing off on wire transfers above material thresholds...I assume that Board and bank officers will get reamed for gross negligence and willful misconduct. Those can pierce liability caps and insurance.
He is more of an idiot than a scammer, legally I think the term is negligence instead of fraud. Having recognized that he caused damage by negligence, additionally I think he was a victim too, he was scammed out of political capital and reputation. I don't think he was in on it, although definitely someone near him definitely was, not necessarily a dev, but definitely someone with a "bag", holding it and speculating that it would go up, essentially utilizing their position for personal gain, which I think is a very classic form of corruption.
It's not the minister of economy, it's not his modus operandi (Funds and offshore accounts), this has the markings of someone young. Whatever he got out of it, either by buying early and holding, or by founding it himself, he for sure lost of all of his political capital.
I'll take a look at the specific contract, and addresses, I'm assuming it's a basic pump.fun thing, but there may be more to it.
Similar question, is it better or worse if our country commits war or war is committed upon us?
And perhaps a different question, regardless if whether it is better or worse, which would we rather be if we had to chose.
Also let's remember that 'neither' is also an option. And oops just happened once but let's not make it a habit, is too. No need to go to extremes.
You are systematically commenting trying to harm his reputation in issues not linked to his disreputable act of promotion of the shitcoin.
Ah, it looks like you were in a coma between about 2006 and 2012. I have bad news. Sometimes (whisper it!) banks _employ incompetent people_. I would be reluctant to take "oh, well, he once worked for _HSBC_" as that much of an endorsement.
Not to say that everyone who worked for HSBC was incompetent. But, er, clearly they were not all hypercompetent either, given what happened.
It's very likely they are denying to delay legal consequences or continue monetizing.
Either way, this event is bad, he is either negligent or criminal, and the opposition has been looking for a motive to impeach him since he took power, I can't believe he gave it to them.
It doesn't seem that long ago that this would have been a scandal but now with the moron in the Oval Office creating his own meme coins without even trying to hide his business interests, and now the president of Argentina is doing the same shit?
Is this really the world that we want? I mean, I guess the answer is "yes", but I don't have to like it.
For those who haven't been following along, here's the highlights.
Adams did some corrupt shit, like really obviously corrupt. Foreign sources made gift offers. Advisors said "no, the mayor definitely doesn't want those gifts because that would be highly inappropriate and illegal." The mayor's office said "actually, we would love those gifts please continue!" All of this is well documented; yes, they took notes on a criminal conspiracy. Naturally, this resulted in criminal charges. Adams screams political persecution because that's what corrupt politicians do when they're caught.
Trump takes office, and this creates an opportunity for further corruption. Adams and Trump make a deal. Adams will facilitate anything Trump wants to do in NYC vis a vis immigration (which may include tactics of questionable legality), Trump's DOJ will drop the charges.
DOJ lawyers who were in the meetings discussing this arrangement were told not to take notes. Hm. Then DOJ leadership directs the lawyers assigned to the case to file a dismissal. They burn through 7 DOJ lawyers who resign rather than sign a dismissal.
The dismissal was eventually signed by Emil Bove, who had been recently appointed to the #2 position in the DOJ by Trump. Bove's previous role was as one of Trump's criminal defense lawyers.
Absolutely fucking corrupt.
To everyone who lives in NYC, remember that there is a primary in June. We can minimize how long this asshole is in power.
> "A few hours ago I posted a tweet, as I have so many other times, supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever. I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet)."
Either the headlines know something we don't know to say he "backtracks on a memecoin" and "Argentinian President Milei launched a memecoin, $LIBRA" or they are not true. Given the context, it seems to be the latter, so I wonder why they'd be lying?
If I drive drunk and then hit someone with my car, I'm not immediately forgiven just because I called 911 and offered to pay the hospital bill.
I don’t like most politicians, but if Bernie Sanders (someone I do like) blanket retweeted a crypto scam, I would say that that’s bullshit. Unless he was the biggest moron on the planet, he would have to know that a retweet will be read as an endorsement by a large number of people.
A public figure, particularly a high-profile elected figure, particularly a figure who is in charge of how laws are enforced, should be held to a high standard.
But as other people have pointed out, it actually wasn’t just a retweet.
No, he wrote the Tweet himself. His words, not a retweet.
It’s right there in the article. I don’t know why people are trying to defend him and rewrite the story.
Really not sure why you say that with such authority.
https://www.history.com/news/roaring-twenties-scams-ponzi-wa...
It happened in the 20s, before 2008, and it's happening again. Trump doing this is an extra level of depraved, and I suspect the coming crash will follow suit.
Normally I'd buy treasury bills, but honestly considering that Elon has been fucking around with the treasury's code with no oversight, and considering that Trump's big strategy for eliminating national debt has been to "declare bankruptcy" (whatever that would even means in regards to an entire country that is the world's reserve currency?), I'm hesitant to even do that.
I wonder if I should look into seeing if I can buy bonds for the EU equivalent of the US treasury...
Ah, but remember the tariffs stuff; you could be looking at _pretty dramatic inflation_ depending on how that works out (personally I suspect he will be ultimately unable to do that much for long; there is likely a level of market disruption at which he will be Liz Trussed, but who knows). All is risk.
> I wonder if I should look into seeing if I can buy bonds for the EU equivalent of the US treasury...
No such thing; the EU doesn't really have debt-raising powers. This confuses people, but the EU/EC is _not_ a conventional government, and has only a tiny budget (170bn this year). You can buy European sovereign debt, but it's on a per-country level. Bear in mind that by doing this you'd also be taking on currency risk. Personally I wouldn't touch sovereign debt denominated in another currency; YMMV.
(With Trump, the dynamic is a bit different, at least for now; he claims to want to do all sorts of absolutely bonkers things, and the markets are generally going "well, yeah, but you're not really going to, are you?")
I might look into one of the “total world” funds instead of just the US based ones like I usually do.
(You may be _slightly_ late. After years of not doing anything much, European markets are up about 10% YTD, Chinese even more, vs S&P500 4%. There's always a bubble, somewhere...)
I was looking into the VT Vanguard fund. I already own a few shares of that, I could always buy more.
Honestly, the rule with indexes is buy and hold. Although I'm confident we have a crash incoming, unless you need the money soon, you should just hold your index funds and add everything you can to it at the bottom. You'll also have to pay taxes on the realized gains if you go to cash. I do believe that Trump's entire presidency is going to be a massive crash, temporary rebound, and then downtrend through 2028. We will probably not return to highs until the 2030s.
I more or less came to the same conclusion that you listed; I don't really want to create a big taxable event, so I think right now I'm going to keep the stock I have, and in the shorter term keep future income in a savings account for awhile and suss out if there's going to be a crash or not.
Obviously you can't really "time" the market but it's a pretty low-risk experiment on my end.
-"Every one of these memecoins serves to make insiders money, what am i supposed to do NOT launch the project?"
-"This famous person lost $5 million so we made him whole and refunded to avoid any issues"
-"These coins are just a casino"
It's so funny that these guys are way more lucid and honest than most of the "investors"
Edit:
Oh man so this guy spends 40 minutes moaning how sniping and scams are rife in the Solana ecosystem but he himself sniped $MELANIA and claims "To not have made any money" which means nothing to me because I'm sure your bank account grew.
Also looked him up and he has 0 experience in development, LA Based, and was an "entrepreneur" for 7 years before becoming the CEO of a Bitcoin consulting company. This guy is the stereotypical rug pull con artist.
Some reports indicate he gets paid to say things about products or companies, which has more credibility because he’s, you know, the president. And that’s what happened with this meme coin thing.
He holds a degree from a third-rate private university. Private university is where you go to school in Argentina for when you don't have the chops for public university and need to go to a degree mill.
His doctorate is from another bullshit institution made up by a rotting old landowning oligarch who holds prehistoric beliefs in just about everything.
I've been following Argentina's struggles for a while given my time in Brazil and the parallels to hyperinflation so I was willing to consider his unorthodox approach, but perhaps it blinded me?
Reasons for liking him: he's bringing inflation down, he has been keeping his promises towards retirees, and he's been reigning in some egregious examples of corruption that previous administrations ignored because it gave them political power.
Reasons for not liking him: he's strangling Universities, rent prices are out of control and not properly reflected in the inflation index, and after being first row during Trump's inauguration he decided to withdraw Argentina from the WHO.
A friend of mine who doesn't like him described his policies as "Ron Swanson from Parks & Rec". I think there's a lot to it.
Anecdotally I also know three families who had to move back to their parent's house because they were priced out of the rental market. I won't say that all of this is Milei's fault (although I do have thoughts about his handling of the Rents law), but nonetheless the current situation is far from good.
Whether or not Milei truly wishes to help his country, or if he's using his power for personal gain, is difficult to say. As an outsider, I don't have an informed opinion. But I'm inclined to believe that the truth is somewhere in the middle. The reality is that the vast majority of people who seek political power are egomaniacs and sociopaths. Very few actually want to help their country.
I did see the news reports about him with a chainsaw. He seemed like a nut when I saw that.
And I then watched the Lex Friedman interview and read the profile in the New Yorker.
I was surprised in that my initial glance at him was not positive but my opinions shifted.
Please give me other nuanced and intelligent discussions. I'm sorry I missed the ones you read.
I am a us citizen. I will say the fact that Milei seems very enthusiastic about Trump is very damaging to his brand for me.
Look at some of the actual details around his wish list, the fantasy of dollarization is a favorite of mine https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2023-11-24/d...
Compare what's promised to what actually occurs. Did he attack the privileged, were the poor lifted out of poverty, has free enterprise restored a moribund economy? https://www.npr.org/2025/02/09/nx-s1-5280631/argentinas-rece...
???
He made a mistake and backtracked instead of instinctively doubling down. Count your blessings.
The man as in an irredeemable narcissistic moron. We’ve had this conversation several times with the same conclusion over and over again. I get that not everyone is into Argentinian politics but by this point it’s well-established knowledge.
[to boil the frog for others, he's claimed his dogs (Conan) are his closest advisors]
If I'm just a blogger on Twitter, then sure.
It is hard to tell whether the US president is more than an effective tweeter. That distinction is important to me.
What does "don't get to" mean? Descriptively, this is false; normatively, this seems like a completely impossible standard to hold presidents to. You want them to literally never make any mistakes?
(cf some fashion blogger with no understanding genuinely being able to claim that promoting crypto was an easily-made mistake)
So maybe, the "sorry, my bad" is the superior way about mistakes.
Did you really put thought into saying this or are you just voicing absurdities for the sake of it?
Either you're saying that an all too human political leader/head of state should never once make any mistakes during their administration, or you're saying that they should double down on anything they claimed and never admit wrong-doing (Trump-style, essentially)
So which is it?
You might disqualify yourself for running for office in the future if you want to continue to argue with me on this. </joke>
This is exactly why you've heard only demagoguery; Austrian school is fringe.
Many of the people who appear to me to talk the most sense (eg: Tyler Cowen) follow the Austrian school. It being fringe does not mean they're wrong. It could be the mainstream is wrong. I'm not an economist and don't know.
Anyway, the criticism about the Austrian school isn't even that it's wrong. It's that it's neither a theory nor a school of though. There isn't much "though" in it. But when you get to the views of an actual person, they will necessarily be more complete than the school, and need to be evaluated independently.
1 - "I can clearly see that objects stop moving without anybody messing with then. That Newton guy makes no sense whatsoever."
It's quite a sad indicator of the state of knowledge in the world where Fridman is considered the more "intellectual" of pop podcasters when the most popular podcasts are crap like Rogan, Shawn Ryan, Candace Owens, and Call Her Daddy.
Because Fridman will literally have a guest with platform A, like Netanyahu, and agree on 95% of his controversial points with little pushback. And then immediately after have on Yuval Harari, with the opposite opinion on those controversial points... and agree with 95% again with little pushback. Fridman softballs and is almost useless except as a megaphone. You'd rather have him cut out and have Netanyahu and Harari debate on their own merits.
Isn't that his whole schtick? Letting people voice their different opinions? Yes his questions are soft. And yes, I'd love to see Netanyahu and Harari debate - can you make that happen?
He is uncritical, yes. But he doesn't deny being uncritical.
It's a useful "service" to get people with diametrically opposite viewpoints to talk freely, and he does that well
The interviewer doesn't need to impose their world view on the guest, or the audience -- it's OK to let the audience make up their own minds.
Contradictions aren't inherently bad, either ... "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", etc.
What if the guest lies or omits crucial facts? How is the audience supposed to know that? Fact checking is the very basis of responsible journalism.
I guess take it for what it is -- it's a conversation recorded on YouTube ... maybe don't be fooled by the suit and the mics. Anyone can buy those, there is no certification AFAIK :-)
(I'd also say that 95% of journalism you see on TV is not much different than a conversation recorded on YouTube, i.e. they don't do fact checking themselves.)
> maybe don't be fooled by the suit and the mics. Anyone can buy those, there is no certification AFAIK :-)
:)
For example, I didn't know who Vivek R was before a month or so ago, and I watched the Fridman interview with him. I actually thought he came off very well ... He got to hit his high notes
Then I watched this Ezra Klein interview, and I got a better picture - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY6NGom3gvU
Vivek got challenged a bit there, in a good way. I saw a lot more of the holes and inconsistencies
(Ezra Klein seems to be a reasonable centrist, more like the reporters of 20-30 years ago. After reading NYTimes since the 90's, I stopped taking at least half of NYTimes seriously maybe around 2015. They were/are literally trolling in their Op Eds for clicks, and greatly expanded that section. But there is still some stuff worth reading)
I also watched parts of Fridman's interview of Milei, and didn't form a strong impression, maybe because of the translation.
His political analysis when interviewing people in that area is laughable. When interviewing chess players it's clear even to me, a mediocre player who barely reaches 1500 in lichess, that he's totally out of his depth and wasting precious time asking generic questions.
Unfortunately the only good interviewer of this generation is the chiken wing guy.
No, they don't teach "meme coins" at university, but I don't think that's really relevant.
How can a president with an army of advisers let him publish something like that? Even if it was his very own mistake it is really unbelievable that people around him didn't know a thing on the matter, is just simply not possible.
He really should stay away from the stupidity of social networks and do better for the country that is still going through hard times.
In one occasion he also denied the climate change, possibly due to Trump's position, showing that he doesn't know a thing about certain topics. In such situations he should really shut up and get properly informed.
A) A fool that hopes to rugpull someone in the future
B) A fool who hasn't made a 5 second google search to how all these coins operate
Either way I have yet to meet any "investor" that has made any money in these investments that couldn't have been made by just parking some cash in Bitcoin / Ether / DOGE if you really wanted to get a taste of cryto.
It's a shame that as I watch more and more of these articles and investigations line up it's clear that there is such a demand to lose money from the populace that they will really turn a blind eye to when political leaders / oligarchs / techbros do it in hopes of being able to cobble together a get rich quick scheme like this.
"It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe"
It also plays neatly into conservative ideals of letting the free market reign and “do your own research” is an excuse for everything. It’s trendy to blame only the buyers of these coins while praising the creators as genius marketers.
That said, the Trump and Melania coins have generated a lot of anger in the crypto space. At first people were twisting themselves into pretzels to pretend it was all very good, but one by one they seem to be capitulating to the idea that it’s not even good for crypto.
But no one deserves to be scammed. I don't really get along with Republicans, I gotta admit I don't really like most Republicans now, and I find the Republican platform reprehensible, but I wouldn't wish being scammed for a conman on my worst enemy.
It's also a potential rail to launder bribes and campaign funding, you name it.
I think a lot of them genuinely think that their godking is going to make them rich and reward their loyalty.
Trump has been licensing his name to anyone who asks for decades.
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/devon-zuegel-on-inflation-argentina...
Politically, Trump’s party controls the government and Trump is incredibly popular with his party. Financially, there hasn’t been a rug pull.
The comparable situation would be Trumpcoin gets wiped out in 2026 amidst the Democrats taking back the House.
There have been concerns of a pump and dump scheme and analysts have viewed it as a "disaster." A forensic analysis commissioned by the The New York Times concluded that 813,294 wallets lost $2 billion by trading the coin while the president's company and partners profited about $100 million from trading fees. According to Fortune, "Less than three weeks after its release, President Donald Trump’s memecoin has produced more losers than winners. For every dollar in trading fees the Trump crypto creators raked in, investors lost $20."
I hope we can all agree, crypto-fans or no, that moon coins are at best a very risky, unregulated gambling prospect!
Stocks aren't zero sum, at least in their idealized form; if I buy a share of some company, they can use that investment to create products or provide value in some form, and if the product is good then that gets reflected in the stock price increasing. It creates value, and the stock price follows.
With cryptocurrency (with maybe the exception of the more computation based stuff like Ethereum?), it doesn't really do anything, it's not creating value. It's just transferring between wallets, and the value increase is pretty much entirely speculative.
Obviously not all stocks are "ideal" like I mentioned above; there have been plenty of cases where stocks are ponzi-adjacent, and it's certainly not uncommon for stocks to be overvalued during bubbles and the like, but my point is that stocks aren't inherently zero-sum like cryptocurrency is.
So, to see if cryptocurrency is a pyramid or not, just look at how much is transacted compared to its total value...
Or don't, because you already know the result. But it's not inconceivable for a cryptocurrency to create value. It's just that nobody did one that does it yet, and the culture around them makes it less and less likely as time passes.
You and the New York Times seem to have misunderstood this important point.
1. Why didn’t any of the marketing materials say that?
2. Why launch $MELANIA?
3. Why didn’t people just trade around a couple bucks over and over to rack up fees, rather than investing as usual?
4. This is edging on partisan politics I guess, but: why donate to the billionaire president…? He doesn’t need a legal fund, he now has free housing, and he’s selling more direct merchandise (watches, NFTs, bibles, etc.) than ever. Just seems like a weird time to donate.
Scammers gonna scam. Suckers gonna lose (including the suckers who fancy themselves as scammers but don’t realise it’s a rigged game).
The notion that laws are preventing a golden age of crypto prosperity doesn’t make any sense. There are numerous countries where these coins can operate and they still don’t deliver any of these claims.
> It’s like Obama only legalizing giant pickup trucks.
What a weird claim. I assume you’re talking about CAFE regulations, but with an extremist conservative talking point twist.
This is a favorite talking point, but people conveniently ignore the fact that we have small and fuel efficient pickup trucks that people don’t buy. Honda made a FWD unibody pickup that fit many needs, but people just don’t want it.
Not to mention the fact that the CAFE regulations were 2025 targets, or that we have had multiple presidents since then and different political parties have had their chance to change things.
Yet blaming Obama is fun, so let’s go with that.
Before you knock it, look at the following:
https://intercoin.app/investors.pdf
https://intercoin.app/currencies.pdf
Or if you want to see actual open source solutions, coded, see here:
https://intercoin.org/applications
I know some people will knee-jerk downvote this. But actually look into the substance, first.
TLDR: I have been speaking against “HODL” and zero-sum games just for “number go up” nonsense, and been building solutions for maximum utility.
I'm not ... completely unable to be persuaded that there are use cases for cryptocurrency. But "Ashton Kutcher should have Aston Kutchercoin, and develop some sort of referral-based pyramid-shaped scheme with it for his fans" is... what is that?
1) A way to fill unsold seats at venues, and always have sold-out events
2) A way to reward his members for spreading his message and bringing more people
3) A way to turn his audience into an army of promoters
4) A way to be independent of banks, and accept global payments
5) A way to have a global online movement that becomes bigger than Ashton Kutcher himself... having subcommunities be empowered to get together and form their own meetups, see it happen around the world, if they get large then Ashton and his crew can come and do a rock concert there
It's great for political campaigns and many movements as well. We did it for Yang's 2020 campaign for example, with "Yang Gangs", that was very early days in 2020
1. How?
2. Reward them with what?
3. Fans are already promoters.
4. Why is this a good thing?
5. This is just describing fandom, which already exists?
To the hopeful new rent seeker, the pitch is obvious. To everyone else, the provided rationales tend to sound like a whole lot of bullshit.
This is like asking why people should switch from telephone switchboard operators, to automatic switchboards. Or why should anyone switch from livery cab services to Uber.
Technology may be "less proven" initially, but it's far more reliable in the end. It also removes a whole class of inefficiencies and conflicts that won't be possible with smart contracts, the same way that you could remove them if you switched from anything custom to anything standardized.
If you just stopped repeating the same tropes "web3 bad" for the sake of saying them, and engage with the substance, you'll see that this is a case of standardization, automation and programming what was previously ad-hoc and requires costly arbitration after the fact.
It's like saying doctors and medicine are desirable once a medical condition arises. But sometimes, preventative medicine and eating right in the first place is better.
An once of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
Web3 can prevent a whole class of problems that normally would require after-the-fact arbitration to fix. It's better to just have existing systems. Like for example having red lights at intersections, where everyone knows when it's their turn to move.
You understand that software can automate things. That's good. Now you have to understand that web3 is nothing but software which is decentralized and byzantine fault tolerant, so you can trust that the code is being executed correctly. This is the massive improvement over code that runs inside some server farm and can be switched up anytime.
It's weird arguing that no, we would rather have databases where certain people have the key to subtly corrupt the entire database, and then we can catch them and try to recover from this corruption using litigation. That's what MtGox was.
> Web3 can prevent a whole class of problems that normally would require after-the-fact arbitration to fix.
Such as?
> This is the massive improvement over code that runs inside some server farm and can be switched up anytime.
Massive theoretical improvement. No debate there. The question is about applicability, which I notice you've still not made concrete.
> It's weird arguing that no, we would rather have databases where certain people have the key to subtly corrupt the entire database
I don't know, it basically seems to work and as far as I can tell, you're about a billion times more likely to have your shit stolen from you in the web3/cryptoverse than using the traditional financial system... except of course if you're a criminal and/or a more grey-area "unsavory character" to some of the main stakeholders. Which that is a good usecase for this tech, of course.
1) People can only act as themselves, they can't log into the database and corrupt all the data in a table, so there is no need to recover from massive systemic corruption (this is the big one)
2) Business rules of smart contracts are enforced, and you know that the state transitions happen exactly as they should (this is the reason that databases use stored procedures, for example)
I can list a few, but there are literally thousands:
1) In an auction, the highest bidder is the one who actually wins, it can't be hacked. You can have N winners, and once the N+1st arrives, it returns the money to the lowest bidder who can bid again. Bids increase at a predictable rate, everyone knows the deal upfront, etc.
As opposed to, say, this on the highest level: https://observer.com/2018/03/christies-sothebys-lawsuits-sho...
2) Salaries can be paid out to specific addresses, at a specific rate, and be approved by managers, with the history of all this preserved
3) Atomic swaps between tokens, escrow, each side knows the money is there and will be released if they do their part
4) Rules about staking reserves, guarantee the money is there for vendors to cash out, vendors must be whitelisted to cash out, etc. etc.
5) Large Communities can enforce their "constitution" and which roles invite which roles, at what rate, etc. Ah here, just look:
https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-defi-communityco...
and so on and so forth
I don't understand why you think this is so critical? This is a solved problem - just have backups and basic security. If it's really critical, there's a lot of ways to log changes. It's not a big deal.
> Business rules of smart contracts are enforced, and you know that the state transitions happen exactly as they should
Ok, but we have that already. They're called regular contracts. If they have bugs or unexpected problems or someone doesn't follow through, you can get the state to make them.
> In an auction, the highest bidder is the one who actually wins, it can't be hacked
And how often is this a problem, exactly? The article says it happens maybe once every five or six years.
> 2-5
We have all of this already. Banks, HR software, escrow, reserves. It works fine.
You want the ability to unwind a contract or a transaction if something goes wrong. In fact, the contracts are only really used if things go wrong. Most of the time, the parties just follow the contact voluntarily.
"Your honor, the smart contract was clear as day: this fraud was totally above board" is not going to work. I promise.
2. With your own coin, obviously. If the coin has value aboard a cruise ship, or events, etc. then everyone wins. There are many businesses that can benefit from selling unused inventory, and they may as well sell it for coins earned for things like bring other paying customers, contributing great testimonials, content, etc. Imagine being able to go on stage if you earned enough "loyalty points" or whatever.
3. Loyalty points have been around forever. And no, fans are not already promoters. I know in my own personal experience that even INVESTORS who invested in your company often sit back and hope that you'll make them a profit somehow, instead of bringing others in behind them. Let alone people who just come to a show. The easier you make it for them, e.g. having your own site with custom links that they can share and earn "affiliate revenue" in your own coin, the more traffic you'll get.
4. You get more traffic. More audience. More capital. More money. More loyalty. Independence from having your speech restricted or demonetized. Look at all the youtube personalities openly saying that they can't say this or that. Many comedians and performers are sensitive to being censored.
5) Also you can easily collect money from a global audience, and pay out to a global audience, without being a central bottleneck (FinTech) and without being required to post surety bonds as a "money-transmitter", instead letting people transact directly and you don't have the liability, and they don't have to trust you like they trust Binance or FTX or Celsius with custody of their funds etc. etc. You just provide the Web interface, they do the transaction, facilitated by IMMUTABLE smart contracts.
It's much better when you can issue your own money supply
The celebrity gets to have their own web server, their own coin, etc. making them independent of Big Tech and Big Banks. They can't get deplatformed. Their community can organize however they deem fit. The smart contracts allow everyone to trust the system.
Just saying someone will "pay you" like they did for millennia doesn't really discuss "in what medium". We have long moved past commodity money, gold blocks, then gold coins, then paper banknotes, to electronic money inside regulated banks, this is just the latest form that money can take.
Opposing it for the sake of opposing it, is like opposing the Web and HTTP and open protocols, because you think AOL and MSN walled gardens ought to be good enough for anybody, and no one really needs any custom servers or self-sovereign websites.
The kinds of people who are concerned are almost always people who engaging in risky or criminal behavior.
In the existing system, people can claw back money if they're defrauded or money is stolen. Under the memecoin system, that's impossible.
In the regular system risk is passed upward to regular bank you deal with, then upward to the government bank. The frustrating part here is that the regular bank makes all, or very nearly all, the profit, yet passes on the risk. This gives them enormous amounts of power, through wealth, which is far from ideal. But, much, much worse is the concept of removing the regular bank, and government bank, replacing them with a random person online. And passing the risk downward to the users of the currency.
And you don't need multiple levels. You can have one level. That's called affiliate marketing.
Loyalty points are a thing. You can earn them as an affiliate, for instance. It doesn't have to be a pyramid. But if you are going that route, almost all startups are "pyramid schemes" that end up with an IPO where the public continues to demand rents be extracted perpetually to boost stock price endlesssly, resulting in increased "enshittification". I'd rather people earn utility tokens they can spend once into the economy, than shares where they have the right to demand rent extraction and enshittification for everyone else.
In this case, this wouldn't even fit the mold for a multilevel marketing scheme, or even affiliate marketing. There are real cash flows detached from a buy-in both of those schemes.
>people earn utility tokens they can spend once into the economy, than shares where they have the right to demand rent extraction
Again, there's cash flows underlying shares of a company. There's not in the case of a digital asset that people refer to as a coin or token.
As far as shares, no. It's completely different. Shares are equity securities, that entitle people to dividends or they want the shares to go up in price. Regardless, it sets up a never-ending demand for enshittification and rent extraction that you see across Big Tech. Utility tokens are fundamentally different and don't have those perverse incentives, and remove the shareholder class. It's like comparing shares in Disney Corp, to Disney Dollars.
I am saying that Web3 should be used by existing celebrities to monetize their existing fame and social capital, sell unsold seats, etc.
I am saying that existing organizations, communities, including entire cities, can benefit from having a decentralized system powered by smart contracts, rather than a random FinTech that posts a surety bond, powering their commerce at scale.
Yes, shares don't necessarily entitle people to dividends, but the point is that the shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, forever. And this is a problem, that doesn't exist when you have utility tokens and cut out the parasitic shareholder class completely.
"The American Conservative further stated that a contingent of Yang's digital followers were only backing him for "a fresh platform for surreal and cynical humor" and that Yang had to denounce part of and distance himself from the movement, which largely stemmed from digital supporters of the Trump 2016 campaign.[85]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Yang_2020_presidential_...
Back in 2017, I designed a system to avoid global consensus:
https://intercoin.org/technology.pdf
If you want to see a visual presentation that explains why we need to go beyond blockchains, then check this out:
Gold Standard, Government Protection, Debt, Government credit instruments.
But everything I read about currency tells me that its largely always just agreed upon make believe. The case with the Real absolutely confirmed that for me.
The benefits of having a common/standard unit for an economic ledger are enormous, as it greatly reduces trading friction. That added benefit has real (i.e., not make believe) value, and the more liquid the currency the higher the monetary premium.
Even after hyperinflation, if you normalize to the money supply, currencies generally don't lose value without losing liquidity (being less "agreed upon") .. "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"
Just like currency. All of those were imaginary since they were invented. People have create physical representations for currency in particular, but that doesn't change the fact that it's only a group of people agreeing on something that only exist on their heads.
Equally imaginary things are "corporations", "governments", "military"... If you push hard enough, even "person" fits that, but this one is deeply entrenched in people's minds.
And, conversely, if you try to pay with cash to some shady people in a parking lot, there's not much good you're going to get out of courts if they defraud you.
If people fail to obtain units of the currency, they default on obligations that have much greater value than the value of the all the cash in the currency. Thus in an ordinary currency the incentive isn't to ignore it, or to sell, but to hoard it so that people can't obtain the money to pay their loans in order to create a crisis so that they can obtain a large fraction of the value of collateral.
This is prevented by central banks. If you try to execute this corner, you will drive up prices, so they will start printing money.
So Bitcoin and Ethereum, both remain memes. Fiat currencies have non-mem value due to the debt.
The government does constantly devalue the currency, though. It does it at an imperceptible pace to not scare the chickens and make business viable. But that's the most they can collect from this system. Anything more and they blow the whole monetary system away.
The money-printing used to break a corner can in principle be small and you can even have an inflation target of zero and still print money to break such corners.
What I want to emphasize with this though, is the source of a currency's value. The collateral of the debt of the loans denominated in it and the social and economic consequences to individuals of defaulting on loans in it. That is the end-source of demand for a currency, and that guaranteed demand is so great that it makes attempting to corner the market in the currency make sense.
If you cornered the market in bitcoin, there's no one who would have to buy even one. That shows how little bitcoin is worth, i.e. zero.
If this makes sense to you, then it'll make sense why Bitcoin is worth something. There is a circular demand to it even without debt. I'll not argue to the legitimacy of that demands (scams, phishing, laundering, etc...) but it is demand and it creates a baseline value (beyond the boom/busts it cycles through).
Because there are denominated loans in dollars people who have those loans have to get dollars to avoid losing their houses etc., and therefore dollars have value.
Because there's very little in loans denominated in Bitcoin, bitcoin has no value.
It is work to 'get' it tho. All the info is available; I can't make it easier to understand than many others out there already have.
You're not wrong that like 99.9% of BTC value is from speculation, but it does have its valid use cases.
From a personal perspective, that absolutely has value. From a public perspective, is the existence of that a good thing? Whole different kettle of fish (and then you're back on the whole "is end to end encryption bad" argument).
If he goes on to promote some unknown shitcoin, said coin could easily pump 1000%, and fall harder.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-...
Any other administration this would have been a huge scandal but when we're in an avalanche of corruption I guess it can be missed.
Liquidity is necessary, and a good marker, but not sufficient.
How so? Liquidity is a measurement of how easy it is to trade, and if it's easy to trade there are many people/entities that believe it's "legitimate" currency, or they wouldn't trade for it
This is where I personally think bitcoin fails.
I completely agree. I don't think this is different from saying the store of value needs to stay liquid tho. Bitcoin is currently very illiquid compared to many things, but there's no reason to think it's liquidity will decrease, and based on trends and first principles of what makes something a good 'money', significant reason to believe liquidity will continue to increase
What I do take issue with is this keeps happening because there's a lot of money to be made off transaction fees so nobody looks too hard into how fraudulent any of these memecoins are before allowing them on the trading platforms.
Admittedly, I don't know how the trading system works so maybe the platforms taking a cut of the profits from the blatantly fraudulent activity are victims too? Crying all the way to the bank I suppose...
All three are true at the same time. Don't mix things up.