The International Monetary fund (IMF) assured that there was no set date for its officials to review the Article IV, an IMF report on the economic situation of countries they are likely to help financially. It is crucial that Argentina appears on this report to improve the relations the country has with the international financial circles.

The IV Article is updated annually with the 186 members of the fund, but the Kirchners have denied such analysis for the past four years. The Paris Club, a group of private investors, requires an IMF check on Argentine economy to negotiate and restructure the US$6.7bn debt the country has with them.

In a speech before the United Nation General Assembly in May 2004, then-president Néstor Kirchner asked for “a structural redesign of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)”, which has changed “from being a lender for development to a creditor demanding privileges”. In 2006, Argentina broke its relations with the IMF. The fund said, along with other financial organisations that the country must come to a debt-restructuring agreement, increase its primary budget surplus to pay more debt and impose “structural reforms” to regain the trust of the world financial community.

A week ago, Amado Boudou, Argentine minister of Economy, participated to the IMF and the World Bank annual assembly in Turkey. Even tough, no formal agreement has been reached. The minister achieved a planned normalisation of the relations with the financial world.

“We would accept an evaluation, not an audit” said the minister of economy. “We want information to be exchanged, Argentina aspires in turning the page on a rather black history when governments were accepting any condition that would be imposed,” he added

The IMF has always been reluctant in granting a preferential treat to Argentina. However, Dominique Strauss-Khan, head of the IMF, claimed the desire of the IMF to come back to normal relations with Argentina.

Since 2006, the Nestor and Cristina Kirchner have tried to solve most of the country debt problems without help from international organisations. However, its reliance with Venezuela which paid for a large potion of its financing needs (estimated at around US$ 6bn) has not been well received by Wall Street circles.

Amado Boudou will meet again with Dominique Strauss-Khann, on next 7th November at the G20 meeting in Scotland.

Brazil is to invest up to US$10 billion in the International Monetary Fund. The move is part of a united effort with the other ‘BRIC’ countries: Russia, India and China. The IMF’s Managing Director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, yesterday issued a statement welcoming the decision.

Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantenga explained that Brazil is making this investment “so that the IMF has the financial resources to help emerging countries, which are facing a scarcity of capital due to the international crisis”.

This loan also marks great progress for South America’s largest economy. “The situation used to be the other way around; the IMF used to loan, to give help to Brazil, when it was a less stable country. Now Brazil has reached this stability and accumulated enough reserves to help the international community. It is an important step to become a creditor and not a debtor of the IMF,” said a triumphant Mantenga.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn declared yesterday, “With this announcement, Brazil is joining other countries in fulfilling the commitment of the G-20 leaders in April. The Brazilian authorities have shown great leadership and encouragement in the whole process of IMF reform and expansion of our funding…Brazil once more reaffirms its strong role as a leading emerging market economy.”

The Brazilian government is reported to have around US$200 billion in international reserves at the moment.

Mantenga added that China planned to invest US$50 billion and Russia US$10 billion. The ‘Bric’ countries plan to hold their first major summit in Russia next week. On their ambitious agenda will be ways to rescue the global financial system.

Argentina is argentinising rapidly. This is surely what you came here to see, and maybe the reason why we Argentines love it and hate it here, all at the same time.

‘Argentinisation’ is a term that has acquired a life of its own in political thought throughout the 21st century. And one you can apply not only to the collective destinies of a nation, but to anybody’s personal life: you argentinise when all conditions are set for you to succeed and, still, you fail systematically.

Local history teaches children at school that Argentina was a world power at the turn of the 20th century, only comparable to emerging countries such as Australia or Canada. Argentines boast a reputation of being, since them, the granary of the world.

And then it argentinised: its elite lost the way, its leadership went corrupt and seemingly incompetent. Democracy was an exception rather than a rule. The 20th was a lost century. Argentina came in very handy for leaders up in Canada and downunder Australia: it provided the perfect case study of what should not be done if you did not want to go downhill into hell.

So no wonder many of you politically savvy foreign people who flew down here in search of some excitement would be next to despairingly disappointed at the sight of a place that seemed pretty regular in the last few years – Chinese speed growth, fiscal and trade surplus, evil IMF paid goodbye, somebody politically unchallenged in charge.

Former president Néstor Kirchner’s campaign slogan in 2003 was as dull as it could get: he promised nothing but ‘a normal country’.

Argentina resembles the best of the world’s possible while it lasts. And it generally tends to last for as long as Argentines refrain themselves from showing their argentinised streak.

For three months now, the country have seen two small groups locking their horns over a handful of tax money. What started as an economic tug-of-war soon became an irrational love affair row on the deck of a political Titanic. The government wants to see Argentina’s farming sector, the engine of Argentina’s economy, ‘down on its knees’ for daring to speak out against an export tax policy hike. The farmers, in turn, expanded their demands from taxes to ‘a change of the economic model’ that was just re-elected by Argentines a few months ago.

Stuck in the middle, ordinary Argentines watch partly awestruck, partly resigned, to rapidly approaching disaster. The Argentine clash for the benefits of expensive food also makes a great story for the international media.

‘Argentinisation’ is about stabbing each other in the back as soon as there’s a chance. You argentinise by murdering each other on the road. You argentinise when evading taxes becomes the norm, or when you smuggle you savings out of the country (Argentines hold as much undeclared cash abroad as the whole of the country’s sovereign debt). You argentinise when you boast to be earmarked for success and do everything within your reach to fail, time and again. You ultimately argentinise when you realise the melody of tango is nice but living up to the melodramatic lyrics may be painful and hard.

Care for a dance tonight?

In times of globalisation, the great thinkers of our time say, the lives of us mortals on Earth are more intertwined and interdependent than they have ever been before. So technically, somebody’s bad news should never be somebody else’s good news. There is always an exception to any rule, though. But the question is, why does the exception always have to be Argentina?

The finances of the world – as you, maybe worried about the value of the greenbacks that give you a fairly decent life in the pampas may have heard – have gone down the road of disaster. Most world leaders were seen grim-faced at the sight of their local stocks sinking to the tune of the Wall Street woes. But one seemed joyful, even exultant at times: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Since President Husband Néstor took office in 2003, the Kirchners have earned a reputation as the financial rogues of the Western world. The truth is that Kirchner the President Husband did not himself declare the largest sovereign debt default in history, a feat performed by a gentlemen who just lasted seven days in office in the hectic days of Argentina’s last super crisis 2001-2002.

But the President Husband did order a bad debt swap that included an unprecedented and somehow humiliating 75% haircut for the bondholders. And, to make matters worse, he paid off the country’s whole debt with the IMF in late 2005 so that he did not have to hear the bureaucrats in Washington telling him what to do with the country’s economy.

Now that the US government has decided to go socialist and the financial world as we knew it is to no longer exist, the Kirchners have switched to ‘I told you’ mode. President Wife Cristina took every single opportunity she was given on national TV to remind the public how right she was about the need for state intervention in the economy and how wrong and hypocritical were those guys – popularly known as ‘the markets’ – who make a luxurious living out of scribbling prescriptions in the form of economic reports about the countries of the Third World.

Oh! This is the Third World. The First World is somewhere else. Listen to the President Wife:

“The First World, which we were repeatedly told was Mecca, is collapsing like a bubble,” she says. Not without a touch of power poetry, she adds: Argentina remains firm ‘in the midst of the swelling sea’. Her punch line is: “It’s time for many of those institutions to look around and do something for themselves instead of telling us what to do all the time.”  

The subtext of President Wife – leave us alone, we know better than you about what’s best for us – might be right. Like President Lame Duck in the north, who is sticking the state nose in the sacred coffers of free markets at a time those coffers are empty, the Presidents Husband and Wife have also done a thing or two to anger the Gods of Demand and Supply.

A dragging public scandal over whether the officials’ inflation statistics are true to reality is just the latest paradigmatic example of a series of government intervention in the economy that ranged from the nationalisation of privatised companies to the incorporation of government-friendly business groups in backbone sectors of the economy, mostly in the energy department.

If more state intervention is the way the world is heading, the Kirchners’ heterodox economic views might as well go down in history as a certain avant-garde deed. But it probably won’t. In the meantime, the Presidential Couple should bear in mind only one political powerhouse on this globe prints the paper the markets bow to. And the money-maker does not dwell in house painted in pink.