President Javier Milei highlighted the decrease in inflation but acknowledged that 'a major correction of regulated prices remains pending'. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Debate, Milei reviewed his management and referred to inflation, which in recent months has shown greater resistance to continued deceleration. In his analysis, the president highlighted the drop in wholesale prices, indicating that 'it is already below 1% monthly.' He also emphasized that 'they had predicted something worse than the Great Depression,' which contrasts with his clarification that 'when we arrived, GDP already had a drop of 3.5 percentage points due to a statistical drag, and we closed with a drop of 1.8 percentage points. That is, it rose to 12 or 13% annually.' However, he admitted that the retail CPI offers greater resistance due to the updating of service costs, as learned by the Argentine News Agency. In this regard, he admitted that 'consumer inflation has more lags, as it suffers from tariff adjustments and the like, making it much more difficult to break through that line.' In the future, Milei warned that the path to price normalization still faces obstacles by indicating that 'there are still corrections to regulated prices, those related to raw materials and the jump in the price of oil.' In another part of the interview, the head of state recalled the fragility of the scenario he found upon taking power in December 2023, indicating that 'inflation was running at 54% monthly' and added that 'we were in a very, very precarious condition to be able to face the debt payment we had', after receiving a Central Bank with negative reserves and debts with importers for US$50,000 million. Likewise, he emphasized that 'in six months we ended with the fiscal deficit' by pointing out that 'we made a fiscal adjustment of fifteen points of GDP' ensuring that it is 'the largest in the history of humanity.' In this sense, he specified that public spending was reduced by 30% in real terms, expressing that 'in monetary terms, we returned US$90,000 million to Argentines.' He also highlighted the nature of the adjustment, indicating that 'the adjustment is recessive when you increase fiscal pressure, but not when you shrink the oppressive and destructive entity that is the State. What we did was shrink the State.' In line with this, Milei maintained that GDP showed unexpected resilience, highlighting that by implementing an adjustment based on the reduction of the State and not on the increase of taxes, the effect is expansive. On this point, he indicated that 'economic theory says that a process like that is usually hyper-recessive. That means that, in reality, GDP grew'.
