A Reflection Paper on Argentina's Economic Crisis
With Argentina mired in its largest economic crisis in history, a proposed devaluation of the currency that for 10 years has been Latin America's strongest was given an approval by the Argentine Congress allowing the government to sharply devalue the currency in the midst of a deepening economic crisis due to the default on its $142 billion national debt which ended the country's 11 years old peg of the peso to the US dollar. Argentina embraced US-style capitalism and adopted US-backed economic reform in the 1990s in the form of a fixed-currency system and unbridled free-market policies. An exchange rate of one-to-one with the dollar had been fixed by the law and every peso from the central bank was backed by a dollar of liquid assets like US treasury notes. The country was invaded by American and European capital investing in Mega-Stores and only a few affluent ones could afford the fruits of globalization through education and employment. Argentina needs a large scale international monetary aid and must develop an endurable economic plan in order to take proper fiscal and monetary measures to come out of the recession and the economic quagmire it has entrapped itself in. The IMF and US have set a number of conditions in order to enable Argentina to qualify for such international loans such as overhauling its tax system, fixing the problem of provincial overspending, letting the peso float freely in the international market, adopting anti-inflationary monetary policy, a plan for lifting a freeze on foreign financial transactions, a concrete measure that its banking systems must continue to work etc.
Such events illustrate how "globalized the international economy had become" (Malcolm, 2001, 88) that reflects the idea of globalization which is " a relatively complete phenomenon in that it connects the economies of the entire planet... demonstrates the
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