I don't see how even the rich could be possibly benefitting from this economy. Property values have gone down, commerce is down, store sales are down. Labor costs are up. etc.
As the IMF rightly put it, cutting public expenditures by 75% is not real "reform" and they do not approve of the speed or depth of his austerity to meet the IMF's deficit reduction.
I don't see it either, but that doesn't mean they are not benefiting.
The world of financial manipulation is foreign to me, When I read that the
agroproductores conceal outgoing money by under-invoicing exports and over-invoicing imports, I had to sit down and think about that for a while before I understood how that would work. I am far from stupid, but still.
How it works is like this. A exports to B 10 million USD worth of soy, invoicing B for 9 million. B pays A that 9 million above the board, where the government can see. Of the extra 1 million, B keeps 100K for himself, and deposits the other 900K in A's offshore account in the Caymans or wherever.
On the flip side, A imports from B 9 million worth of machinery. B invoices A for 10 million, and A pays the invoice, all above board. Of the extra 1 million, B keeps 100K for himself, and deposits the other 900K in A's offshore account in the Caymans or wherever.
It all makes sense when somebody walks you through it step by step, but people like you and me would never dream this shit up in a million years.
Yet people of the moneyed class learn this shit from the time they are small, they suck it up with their mother's milk. That's part of why they are rich and we are not. The other part, of course, is that they were born rich. Many of the huge landholdings in this country, perhaps most of them, go all the way back to the
virreinato, or the civil wars which followed immediately upon independence,
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