----- Original Message -----
From: "Bradford DeLong" <jbdelong at uclink.berkeley.edu>
> >Speaking of which, that's an eloquent column of yours, Brad, that graces
my
> >morning Business Day op-ed page here in Jo'burg. But you seem to lay the
> >blame for Argentina's problems entirely on political populism with nary a
> >word about Wall Street loan pushers or US Treasury Dep't policy. Given
the
> >ID tag line, it looks really self-serving, given that the debate here
(even
> >in the neolib Business Day) has gone a very long way to fingering the
> >Fischer/Summer tag team. How'd you forget that factor?
> ??You seem to have read something different than I wrote:
Brad, just FYI, the only 'grafs that didn't get into the SA version were these two:
> The 1970s were worse, when an army with no honor would
> push women out of helicopters into the cold South Atlantic, and an
> urban guerrilla movement would shoot people because... because...
> because... well, just because! The 1980s were worse, starting with a
> full-fledged debt crisis triggered by a massive rise in both U.S.
> interest rates and the value of the U.S. dollar, ending with a
> full-fledged domestically-generated hyperinflation, and during which
> Argentinean development fell another full decade further behind the
> world's best-practice economic frontier.
> The establishment view--the one you would hear in, say, U.S. Treasury
> Undersecretary Taylor's office with the blue-and-gold star-spangled
> carpet, and the one that I more than half agree with--is that
> Argentina's crisis and economic collapse was the fault of Argentina's
> politicians.
My complaint remains: you focus on "politicians" like you're some anti-gummint redneck, even when you do your anti-establishment analysis. Doug pointed out the need for structural analysis of North-South relations. I would add that the pro-Argentina pro-dollarisation hype from Washington (and U.Chicago types, maybe augmented with a little Mundell-Flemming) during the late 1990s needs a full confession. In other words, Brad, take the damn debate forward, not sidways. That newspaper prints pieces once a week or so by Stiggy, Rodrik and their local equivalents. Get up to standard...
Cheers, Patrick