Argentina’s new president, the self-styled anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, takes on one of the world’s toughest economic challenges on Sunday.
The country is a big food exporter and used to be one of the wealthiest nations in the developing world, but decades of mismanagement have wrecked the economy and created a web of artificial price and exchange rate controls that have produced huge distortions.
A libertarian economist whose beloved pet dogs are named after ideological heroes such as Milton Friedman, Milei campaigned on promises of taking a chainsaw to the state, closing down the central bank and replacing the peso with the US dollar. But he has made a dramatic shift towards moderation since winning the election.