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ENGLISH VERSION
No direct current in DC
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| Michael Soltys |
HERALD STAFF |
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President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner does not cement her place as one of the world’s top 20 decision-makers when she spent most of her speech at Saturday’s G20 crisis summit in Washington talking about Argentina’s recent past instead of the world today and tomorrow. CFK had problems transcending her domestic agenda centring around Thursday’s Senate vote on the elimination of the AFJP private pension funds, blaming them for 42 percent of Argentina’s defaulted debt of 2001 and hence the subsequent meltdown — even allowing for the fact that New York judge Thomas Griesa has made Argentina’s pension system an international issue by freezing all AFJP assets in the United States (some 2.5 billion dollars), this still remains a hopelessly parochial perspective for such a lofty summit.
Yet perhaps being part of the solution to a truly global problem is too much to expect from CFK if she remains convinced that this crisis is the inevitable consequence of globalization as such. Her main contribution along global lines was to join the call for a new international financial architecture to replace the International Monetary Fund (even if her own husband repaid the IMF in full early in 2006, spending nearly 10 billion dollars in Central Bank reserves). She also argued in favour of more assistance for emerging countries, implying that Argentina needed more assistance to avert another default — although the IMF or any other lender would be sure to bring up the issue of INDEC statistics bureau’s manipulation of inflation data to lower the yield from index-linked bonds. Cristina Kirchner also called for “another capitalism,” referring to a more productive model.
Argentina cannot take its G20 place for granted if its own neighbour Brazil was initially in favour of G14 proposals. Such eccentricities as showing up 45 minutes late for the group photo or spurning to grant a press conference which her often more distinguished colleagues hold as a matter of course would remain in the realm of anecdotes if she had something of substance to contribute — but the point is that she does not. More than one G20 member will be wondering why Argentina is automatically a member of this select group and Spain not when CFK does so little to change the dismal expectations from a nationalistic and populist administration which cannot even publish reliable economic indicators — Argentina’s phenomenal growth rates from the past five years would seem to be its main qualification but these may soon change. Today’s world has too many problems to have much room for people who only have time for their own.
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