The Financial Times dedicated on Monday an editorial to Argentina and its current strategy to avoid again defaulting by pressing on the IMF, and later on sovereign bondholders, for a significant haircut in its national debt approaching 90% of GDP. However, FT points out that “debt talks are unlikely to succeed without a strategy for economic revival”
Argentine vice-president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner insisted in her criticism of the IMF for the alleged violation of its statutes by awarding the previous Argentine administration of president Mauricio Macri a disproportionate credit, despite the fact the Fund rejected the accusation and ratified that no debt shaving is possible under its rules.
A smiling Pope Francis welcomed the new president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, to the Vatican on Friday morning and then spoke with him in a private audience for 45 minutes, signaling that good relations exist between the two leaders and suggesting that this could perhaps open the door for the pontiff’s first visit to his homeland since his election—though the president later said they did not discuss this.
He was considered the guru of Argentine electoral campaigns, the man who helped Mauricio Macri jump from president of one of the two most popular soccer teams in the country, to twice mayor/governor of the City of Buenos Aires and finally to occupy during four years the Pink House, Casa Rosada, defeating the hegemonic Peronist movement.
Former Argentine president Mauricio Macri has been appointed executive chairman of the FIFA Foundation, the organization founded by world football's governing body in 2018 to promote social change. But his nomination was received with a raft of criticisms by Argentine clubs and associations.
Argentine President Alberto Fernandez on Monday night confirmed that the national government had no plan to bail out Buenos Aires province, which has a payment due later this month on hard-currency provincial debt.
President Alberto Fernandez said he has set a March 31 deadline to renegotiate Argentina’s rampant public debt and that a more “innovative” International Monetary Fund approves of the direction his government is taking.
Argentina’s new government is working “nonstop” to resolve its sovereign debt crisis, the country’s Economy Minister Martin Guzman said, a month after center-left Peronist President Alberto Fernandez took office.
The Argentine government announced that this week it will honor payments of some US$ 850 million, which correspond to two different sovereign bonds, one of them a century maturing bond issued in 2017 during the administration of ex-president Mauricio Macri.
Argentines ever so suspicious of their currency and so fully confident in the all mighty US dollar, they have some US$ 322 billion hidden in the “mattress”, which means mostly overseas in bonds, shares, real estate, according to the latest figures released by the country's stats office, Indec.