MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentina blasts the credit-risk agencies and warns of global “anarchy-capitalism”

Minister Lorenzino, “please gentlemen, let’s be objective”

Members from the Argentine government defended the “Kirchner inclusive development model” and blasted the credit-risk rating agencies while warning of the existence of a financial “anarchy-capitalism” which is suffocating the economies of the world.

During a special session of the Council of the Americas in Buenos Aires, Industry minister Debora Giorgi said that “while industry in the leading economies of the world are showing a timid recovery which is below the pre-crisis levels or in some cases another dip, the economies of South America, with active government policies are rapidly recovering”.

“Argentina in particular is showing a manufacturing activity which is 10% above the pre-crisis level” said the minister.

Cabinet chief Juan Manuel Abal Medina mentioned that the world economies are threatened by a kind of “anarchy-capitalism” which is unregulated, takes advantages of capitalism’s loopholes and has no respect but for their interests and profits”, which helped to push the world to the current situation.

Economy minister Hernan Lorenzino targeted the credit risk raging agencies and called on the business community to look at the records and forecasts they have anticipated for example, for Argentina.

“For the last five years they have been rating us as a country in crisis and forecasting the country could blow up at any moment, but it doesn’t blow up”, said Lorenzino who then invited the audience “to abandon this perverse mechanism created by the risk-rating agencies”.

He recalled that according to those agencies’ reports Argentina was better off in 2001, when the country faced one of its most severe crises of the last hundred years, than now, “please gentlemen let’s be objective”.

The meeting which convened several hundred entrepreneurs and was organized by the Argentine Chamber of Commerce also included the president of the Council of the Americas, Susan Segal; the CEO of Chevron for Africa and Latinamerica Ali Moshiri and YPF CEO Miguel Galuccio, who pledged that soon “Argentina will again become a net exporter of oil”.

The meeting was organized basically to attract investors and people interested in making business with Argentina, and despite the encouraging messages from the local ministers official and private data is beginning to show that the country is facing a deceleration of the economy and a drop in the volume of exports.

Last July the Argentine government admitted the slowing down of the economy hit by the global crisis, a severe drought in agriculture which forced to lower significantly harvest estimates and the lesser growth in Brazil. However the central bank anticipated that in the second half the economy will pick up and end positively, not like in 2011, but with a strong performance.