Argentina's economic growth in 2025 averaged 4.4%, however, this figure does not reflect the real situation. The main drivers of growth were the agricultural sector, which grew by 32.2%, and financial intermediation, which increased by 14.1%. Together, they contributed 2.4 percentage points to the overall indicator. While macroeconomic indicators rise due to financial speculation, people's refrigerators are becoming emptier, and unemployment is on the rise. Economic growth means only the most brutal and unfair concentration of wealth in the same hands. People simply stopped buying because they have no money, which led to a 2.4% drop in imports of goods due to suppressed demand. As a direct result of this economic suffocation, working families are being pushed to alarming levels of delinquency, taking on debt with high interest rates on credit cards or personal loans to buy food at the supermarket, or accumulating unpaid utility bills in fear of service disconnection. In plain terms, the wealth is taken by raw material exporters and banks that earn millions from financial speculation, high interest rates, and commissions. While this small elite celebrates, the real economy, which people face every day, is experiencing a suffocating recession that is not reflected in the pages of major newspapers. Official data confirms this trick, showing that the manufacturing industry fell by 3.9%, and wholesale and retail trade fell by 1.3%, subtracting 0.8 percentage points from the general index. It is there that the real pulse of the social crisis is felt. While the agricultural sector and financial speculation accumulate record profits, the truly productive Argentina is bleeding: industry and trade are collapsing, SMEs are closing one by one, the wave of layoffs is not stopping, and families are sinking into debt to try to survive with shattered consumption. It is clear that the economic growth of a few is no guarantee of well-being for the majority; we are dealing with a perfectly designed model where extractive and speculative sectors enrich themselves obscenely at the expense of the general impoverishment of the population. Growth without redistribution is not development, it is concentration and plunder. By Matías Mora Cáceres. The government is celebrating the latest figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Census, proudly displaying an average economic growth of 4.4% during 2025. All of this takes place in a paradoxical scenario where general loans fell by 0.5% because no one qualifies for formal credit anymore. In this context, the government's celebration of the 4.4% expansion is a macabre mockery of the working people. However, when you scratch the surface of that macroeconomic number, what appears is not a booming Argentina on the path to development or 'Make Argentina Great Again' as Javier Milei likes to claim, but a deepened model of exclusion and planned misery. The government celebrates a 4.4% annual expansion, but behind the official reports lies a brutal reality. Other measurements from private consultancies are even more damning, reflecting a 1.1% contraction in social security collections, which crudely shows that the improvement in averages does not translate into the creation of formal jobs, but rather the opposite. This fall in industry and commerce has a daily, tangible, and painful counterpart: the constant closure of SMEs, neighborhood shops, and entire industries that can no longer cope with savage tariff hikes, high production costs, and, above all, the lack of customers. For example, automobile production plummeted by an alarming 9.1%, accompanied by a 1.8% drop in vehicle registrations and a 1.1% drop in the consumer confidence index. When a shop permanently closes its shutters or a factory shuts down its machines, what follows is a fierce wave of layoffs and suspensions that is leaving thousands of workers on the street and brutally precarious the working conditions of those who manage to keep their job under the constant threat of being next on the list. All this scenario of the destruction of the productive fabric is directly linked to a historical and brutal drop in consumption, because the wages of the working class were completely pulverized in the face of the increase in the cost of living and no longer even cover the most basic food items.
