guy was driving through Buenos Aires at the moment of winning score

[peppertree]

3. You're probably right. It might be my impression.

My understanding is that it's been hard down there, for the average working family, since shortly after Perón died in '74 - which of course has only added to his appeal among the downtrodden since then.

If you blended Bernie Sanders' policies, with Trump's authoritarian and theatrical ways - you'd get Juan Perón.

Argentina had - by far - the largest (proportional) middle class in Latin America, and its best-paid, most unionized working class. "You almost forgot you were in the third world," as a BBC documentarian at the time put it.

Not any more.

A lot of the decline since then has to do with the Bush-style debt bubble/collapse under the dictatorship in 1978-82.

$40 billion in foreign debt was taken on, of which $30 billion was used to finance the dollarizing and offshoring of peso assets by speculators (domestic elites and foreign fly-by-nighters). They made off like bandits - and left everyone the bill.

Except Argentina didn't have a Fed to bail it out - so that debt has snowballed ever since.

No matter how much in trade surpluses they earn, most gets eaten up by interest payments - leaving (relatively) few dollars for anyone else.

All this usually gets left out of debates on the "Argentine failure."

Thanks again for reading, BlueWave, and All the Best.