Argentina’s Long Road to Ruin
On July 2, Argentina’s centrist economy minister, Martín Guzmán, resigned. The peso’s value plummeted 26% in the next 26 days. Three weeks later, President Alberto Fernández, a left-leaning law professor who took office in December 2019, sacked Mr. Guzmán’s successor.
The official inflation rate is now 64% and economists forecast it could reach 90% by December. Wages haven’t kept up, and the gap between the official and black-market exchange rates hasn’t been this wide since Argentina’s hyperinflation crisis of 1989-90, when inflation soared to 2,600%.