In Trump's world, Argentina gets a bail out and Brazil gets a 50% tariff.

Last edited Thu Sep 25, 2025, 09:58 AM - Edit history (1)

Lula is a progressive and Melei is a slash and burn Libertarian.







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This year, everything about Milei’s program unraveled. Little foreign investment materialized. Inflation crept back up. The overly strong peso depressed exports. Argentina has had to dip into scarce dollar reserves to defend the peso’s value against the dollar and is almost out of hard currency. The austerity crushed both consumer demand and Milei’s approval ratings.
It’s instructive to compare Argentina with its neighbor, Brazil. The Brazilian economy, led by the progressive Lula, is in excellent shape. GDP growth has been over 3 percent a year for the past three years. Inflation has been below 5 percent. And Brazil runs a trade surplus.

But Brazil, for reasons that have nothing to do with economics and everything to do with Trump’s embrace of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, now facing a prison term for an attempted coup, has been hit with a 50 percent punitive tariff, while Argentina is in line for tens of billions of U.S. dollars. Thus does ideology trump economics.

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-09-24-bessents-bizarre-bailout-trump-milei-argentina/