"Between 40 and 50 I think we'll be able to help you,"
David Malpass told Nicolas Dujovne in May 2018.
It was the initial kick of an amount and a relationship that
would reconfigure the parameters of the Argentine economy and politics
going forward.
Malpass was Undersecretary for International Affairs of the US Treasury Dujovne, Minister of Economy of Argentina in the government of Mauricio Macri.
The American announced this week that at the end of June he will leave the presidency of the World Bank that he has held since 2019.
Dujovne and Malpass spoke for no more than 20 minutes that time.
The American, a man close to the then US president.
Donald Trump, and married to a Venezuelan,
was well aware of the Argentine crisis at the time
.
"What help are you thinking of?"
He faced Dujovne.
— I like the Uruguay model
, replied the Argentine, who had seen that in the 2002 crisis, Uruguay had first obtained a stand-by loan of US$781 million and a few months later US$1,500 million more (23% of GDP). .
Argentina could request no more than 435% of its quota according to the IMF statute,
which gave some US$ 20,000 million of credit floor
to request.
If it was taken into account that the Fund had decided to extend aid to the countries because the quotas had become out of date due to financial globalization that exacerbated the episodes of balance of payments crises, Argentina would have access to more money
.
In the end it made US$ 54,000 million in 2018
.
The name of Malpass's successor has not yet been released.
An unwritten rule indicates that it will be Joe Biden who nominates the next candidate.
Whoever his successor may be, and despite the justified criticism he received for his reluctance to the climate change agenda, with Malpass out of Washington comes a person who navigated international financial diplomacy at a pivotal moment between Wall Street and the emerging
world
.
Malpass joined the Treasury in the 1980s, taking part in projects such as the packaging of the bank debt of countries such as Argentina and Mexico with
Brady
bonds .
He was also chief economist at Bearn Stearns.
The American economist Bradford De Long, in his extraordinary book 'Moving slowly towards utopia' -book of the year according to the
New York Times-
, considers that the 20th century is the period from 1870-2010.
If De Long is right and the world is facing new problems today, it is logical to find a generation of economists like Malpass whose footprints and experience in the exercise of economic policy in recent decades are beginning to be seen in the rearview
mirror
.
However, it is not going to be that the last jedis of the world economy out there turning around and
their legacies for what is to come
are underestimated .
This week the Financial Times published an article on the influence of Stanley Fischer on recent central bankers following the appointment of the prestigious Japanese academic and economist, Kazuo Ueda (71 years old), as president of the Bank of Japan.
Beyond Fischer's academic imprint that FT emphasized, Stan -as he is known- was also in the trenches.
And a hot one.
He was president of the Central Bank of Israel, chief economist of the World Bank, number two of the IMF and three of the Fed.
With the same spirit of rescuing the practical aspect of economic policy, this week there will be a conference in honor of the Argentine economist Guillermo Calvo
-who anticipated the Tequila Effect of 1995 that hit the emerging world after the fall of the Wall-
, at the University of Columbia in New York with the presence of Central Bank officials, former Economy Ministers, IMF staff and academics such as Andrés Neumeyer, Federico Sturzenegger and Iván Werning among others.
The seminar is called 'The credibility of government policies'.
“Credibility is a fundamental asset of the maker of economic policy, and a determinant of the effectiveness of his announcements. At the same time, the measures of the policy maker influence their future credibility”
, explained to Económico, the Argentine economist Martín Uribe, one of the organizers of the seminar together with Neumeyer.
Malpass, Fischer, Calvo, each one in his field, tried to attend to this aspect that Uribe points out, that of credibility.
Curiously, the first two have provided millionaire loans to Argentina in the last almost 20 years.
Fischer 'El Blindaje' and Malpass the US$ 54,000 million
(both failed).
Calvo, for his part, has also maintained for years that
the lack of credibility in Argentina weakens any announcement
, financial aid and even adjustment that is made, because investors believe that it will happen -for example a correction-, and they invest little sharpening the crisis.
"For example, we see the difficulty that the Argentine Economy Minister is having in lowering inflation despite having carried out a more contractive fiscal policy than his predecessor -says Uribe-, a possible explanation has to do with whether people perceive that as As this year's presidential elections approach, the probability that economic policy will turn to a reissue of the Platita Plan increases, the current fiscal squeeze will have less
deflationary
effect ."
Doing economy is working without certainty and resorting to audacity.
At times in excess.
In 2001 José Luis Machinea asked Fischer.
"Köhler tells us to go 1 on 1, but do you know how to do it?"
.
Köhler was the 1 of the IMF.
"We have no idea
," Stanley replied.