President Javier Milei received American economist Robert C. Merton at the Quinta de Olivos residence, renowned worldwide for his contributions to financial theory. Merton was the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997, an award he shared with Myron Scholes. The meeting was reported by the Office of the President, along with a photograph of the encounter, in which Milei is seen wearing a YPF uniform. This meeting is part of the Argentine government's interest in validating its economic program with prestigious international figures in finance. Robert C. Merton, born in 1944, is a global reference in financial economics and is the son of influential sociologist Robert K. Merton. His academic career has focused on advancing the application of stochastic calculus and optimal control to develop models for decision-making in markets. Along with Fisher Black and Myron Scholes, Merton is a co-author of the famous Black-Scholes model, a tool that revolutionized the valuation of financial options and was fundamental to the global expansion of derivatives markets. His mathematical developments allowed for a qualitative leap in the precision with which markets can estimate prices, risks, and future behaviors. Merton and Scholes won the Nobel Prize in 1997 specifically for "a new method for determining the value of financial derivatives." Merton's connection with the current Argentine government was established previously when the Nobel laureate invited the Undersecretary of Economy, José Luis Daza, to give a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Milei celebrated this fact on his social media at the time, publishing a message from Daza: "I woke up in the morning and found a message from José Luis Daza telling me that Nobel Prize in Economics Robert Merton invites him to give a conference at MIT in light of the interactions between the economic and financial plane of our stabilization program." It should be recalled that after winning the Nobel, Merton and Scholes linked to the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) investment fund, which suffered a multi-billion dollar loss in 1998 that required a rescue coordinated by the main Wall Street banks before its final closure.
