Dope
It is time to talk about... Argentina.
That's right. The country that, in the early 90s, made foreign investors cream in their boxers by adopting those golden Chile policies - free markets for everybody was the slogan. Tie the peso to the dollar, slay that inflation, and what do you have? An investors dream.
Luckily, when an investors dream turns into a nightmare, you always have the government.
So, the IMF loaned de la Rua's government its money. Is this good news?
The Times Analysis was characteristic of the Times. Here's a move that is mainly going to benefit those speculators that have loans to Argentina. And those investors, those emerging market managers, are they headquartered in Buenos Aires? Is the pope a Mormon? Of course they aren't. Look for their offices in shady Westport, Connecticut, or in the LatinAmerican sections of the Morgan bank, and Citicorp. But no - in keeping with the fiction that foreign policy in the US responds strictly to our ideological need for promoting democracy and free-trade (valued by the Times as much as democracy, as any avid reader of that rag knows), the key graf here reads:

"The decision underscored that even at times when the United States holds most of the cards � it is the largest single shareholder in the I.M.F. and is generally thought to have veto power over new loans � it finds it difficult to deny an urgent request from an ally. It also cannot simply walk away from the interventionist financial diplomacy of the Clinton administration. That is, at least in part, because after a decade of fast-paced economic integration it is hard to separate financial rescues from other foreign policy priorities the Bush administration puts higher on its agenda, like free trade, open stock and bond markets, even democracy."

Although it makes me a little ill to agree with Paul O'Neill, our secretary of ALCOA, I mean the Treasury, he was right that the IMF bailout makes little sense. First of all, what advantage accrues to the average Argentinian in "tightening his belt?" O'Neill, in interviews last week, indulged in the typical Yankee luxury of dissing aspects of the Argentine economy that are even worse in the USA - for instance, that Argentina is a poor exporter. Well, its trade balance compares favorably with this country's, as O'Neill knows. The US can afford to run twenty years of trade deficits because it has a uniquely large internal market - most countries can't do that. But the way to wealth, as the crash of 98 and as the petit mal of 2001 is showing, is not to jump up an export economy and ignore the internal market - in fact, that is crazy. Unfortunately, governments that heavily borrow to implant infrastructure for creating exportable goods eventually bleed the internal market by adversely affecting their native wage levels - and so far, the theory that one can bootstrap out of this as minimally compensated workers begin to accumulate enough capital to stimulate a viable consumer sector - as in the US - just hasn't worked.
For a scary whiff of the rhetoric that is emanating from certain circles in Buenos Aires right now, here's a graf from an op ed piece in the Buenos Aires Herald.

"For the last year or so, Argentina has been edging nearer to the queue that is awaiting its turn outside the knacker�s yard where �failed states� are broken up. Some suspect it will soon barge its way towards the front. Last week, a former president of Uruguay, no less, titillated Spaniards with an article in El Pa�s in which he posed the question: Does Argentina still exist or has it already left us? Being an optimist at heart, towards the end of his article Julio Mar�a Sanguinetti did find some reasons for hope of which the most encouraging was the allegedly splendid quality of Argentina�s �human capital.�
The trouble is, people have been going on for decades about just how exceptionally bright they think Argentines are, but this belief � which, as might be expected is popular among Argentine intellectuals � has surely contributed a great deal to the collective debacle by making too many of them assume that the country�s plight is none of their doing or that, seeing they are so clever, they will find it easy to wriggle out of any hole they may have fallen into while their eyes were fixed on the stars. In any case, even were it to be proved beyond doubt that Argentina really is home to an astonishing number of �bermenschen that would be no consolation at all: the Titanic would have gone down just as fast if every single passenger had been a PhD."