October 19, 2011
I see that my earlier blogpost on Planet Money’s podcast on Argentina has prompted a defense from both Planet Money and Megan McArdle. Both seem to feel that the piece on Argentina was quite balanced and indicated that there were many positive aspects to Argentina’s decision to default.
That was not the story that I heard. The piece I heard began by mentioning Greece’s debt crisis and then said (slight paraphrase):
“There is a worst case scenario and that scenario has a name: Argentina.”
My guess is that if we can promise the Greek people a policy path that will give them 3 months of sharp downturn, followed by 3 months of stagnation and then 9 and half years in which its economy will grow at an average annual rate of close to 7 percent, they would jump for joy. No one has a path for Greece that looks even half as promising as the route that Argentina has actually followed. So the question is how can Planet Money accurately describe this as a “worst case scenario?”
In fact, even Planet Money’s defense of its piece begins by citing this line from the story:
“It has been a tough decade for Argentina.”
Of course the data show that it has not been a tough decade for Argentina. It had recovered the ground lost to the recession by 2004. Argentina’s economy then enjoyed 4 more years of exceptional growth before the world economic crisis temporarily derailed it in 2009, but it then saw strong growth resume again last year.
There certainly were problems from the default. As McArdle points out, some of Argentina’s creditors are still pursuing their claims in various jurisdictions, including the United States. (The creditors’ representative here, Robert Shapiro, was featured prominently in the podcast.) This makes it difficult for Argentina to borrow in international capital markets.
The IMF did everything in its power to try to sink the country’s economy, including making bogus growth projections. In the three years prior to the default every single IMF growth projection proved overly optimistic. In the three years following default every single IMF growth projection proved overly pessimistic. The probability of this happening by random chance is non-existent.
(Btw, McArdle asked why I began my chart in 1998. The answer was to show the full extent of the downturn preceding the default. Economists usually believe that it is easier to recover from a cyclical downturn than to increase growth from a trend path, so I was trying to show the extent to which the post-default growth was just the recovering from the downturn.)
But the question is not whether the default caused problems, the question is whether anyone on Planet Earth can describe Argentina as presenting a worst case scenario for Greece as Planet Money clearly did.
Comments