Argentina

“Two-thirds of employment in Argentina is civic, is, is, is government employees.”

“And then over a period of like a hundred years of bad economic policy, of essentially like socialist policies of them, the government, like stealing wealth from the people. Well, claiming to help them. It's now like the 100th richest economy in the world. It w…”

“Argentina is a great opportunity too, and they're well ahead of where Venezuela is.”

“In emerging markets I've always believed that getting the country right is very important. Country. And then at the end of the day, Like you have to buy the best quality companies in that country, but if you get the country wrong, then if you're investing in A…”

“I had a business in Argentina, business folded. I had a business in money markets. Change one regulation made the company unprofitable. I had a business in Brazil. The 51% owner, because you have to have that locally there, took over the small business through…”

“In Argentina, it's probably the number one means of payment by far.”

“And if you look at with Millet in Argentina, what he's done, I mean, that's been one of the most exciting transformations to watch.”

“If you look at the Argentinian ETF, ARGT, it's up 60% year to date, 65, which suggests the optimism around Argentina's economy has reversed, you know, from where it was.”

“It's already because of the cuts he's made. They now have a more normal inflation rate, and they've gone from basically being uninvestable to investable as a country.”

“If what he said is true about what's been accomplished, it may be the fastest impact a president of a country has ever had on, on, on the trajectory of that company country.”

“His austerity measures by absolutely slashing government spending has reduced monthly inflation from 25% to around, you know, three and a half percent.”

“99.9% of the world's lithium reserves are in the hands of just four countries, China, Chile, Argentina, Australia, none of which are the United States.”

“So even now, if you go to Argentina, you don't go to a bank to exchange your currency. You go to the black market. Because you get a much better rate, and oftentimes they run out of dollars in the banks in Argentina.”

“I had a friend who ran, I kid you not, A distributor for Mercedes-Benz in Argentina. And when Cristina Fernandez came in and took over the government, they nationalized his business and they mandated he produced coffee.”

“A new president, Cristina Fernandez came in and outlawed foreign investors overnight. My business completely died. Had to leave the country. No business any longer.”

“We got pushed out of Argentina entirely when Cristina Fernandez came in, took over, nationalized all industry, and actually made my business illegal, which was, all we did was, we have international investments, and so if you want to invest outside of Argentin…”

“First of all, I think it's rationalized as being, hey, there's economic excess for a few while the majority are left behind. It's activated by big bureaucracy, by anti-free market principles, and by tax policies and spending policies that will ultimately cripp…”

“I wasn't at Davos, but I saw the speech in Davos, and it was about one o'clock in the afternoon in my office. I dialed up perplexity, and I said, give me the five most liquid ADRs in Argentina. It gave me enough of a description That I followed the old Soros r…”

“From a macro perspective, what Millay is doing is significantly different than what we're seeing in any other emerging market, let alone mature market with respect to fiscal austerity, And appropriateness in this sort of inflationary, global inflationary envir…”

“Like Argentina, something like last number I saw was 18% of Argentinians have owned a stable coin. In America, fifty million people have crypto and mostly Bitcoin.”

“Argentina at this time was wealthier than France or Germany. Twice as wealthy as Spain and had one of the top 10 highest GDP per capita of any nation on earth in 1913.”

“And I noticed that even though like things can be in the short term, unjust, I think the system coalesces into fairness and justice much more frequently here than where I come from.”

“Few people know that between Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, that's 60% of the world's lithium. I mean, that's, Bolivia alone is one-third of the world's lithium.”

“The reality is that Argentina as a culture has this pessimism built into it. There's this great quote of like, pessimism makes you sound smart. And frankly, there's a lot of extremely smart, creative people. There's all this, like, cultural intermix in Argenti…”

“The price of a basket of basic products in Sudan is up 1900%. In Syria, it's up 700%. In Ethiopia, it's up 175%. In Argentina, it's up 300%. Even in the U.S., it's up 67%. Europe, 80%.”

“I almost spent five hundred million dollars on buying a company in Argentina, and then the day bids were due, I woke up and said, what the hell am I doing? And I'm glad we didn't buy it because the country went where it went.”

“Today's leftists in America are not the leftists from a generation ago. Again, you learn from your father's mistakes. In Latin America, you talk to guys in Chile and in Colombia and in Mexico, they've learned from Chavez. They've learned from Argentina. They d…”

“Next year might be the best performing market in the world on the back of that election.”

“Pre-COVID, a hundred percent, but they were expats, so it's, ah, they were living in Argentina, or I was hitting up a lot of college kids saying, don't go into a cubicle. Come live abroad for a year or two.”

“So I got together with a friend, her name was Frances, at business school. She worked at Google, and we each put in 12,000 dollars, which was obviously like a lot of money for us both, but it's what I had, and so we put in this money, and we hired a team of en…”

“What probably will happen is those countries that have the most reckless policies will find that there is a greater check on them.”

“One is cost, about 20 cents on the dollar. The second is just an incredible education system. They are able to take a concept, take an end goal, and build around that, build up to that, understand all of the dynamics and potential solves without needing line-b…”

“E-commerce penetration is sort of five percent in most of these markets. It's not where, whereas China is sort of 25 to 30% e-commerce penetration, like Brazil and Argentina are kind of five percent”

“And in Argentina, as I mentioned, as you mentioned, is really the one place where I saw that happening, where I saw ordinary people who didn't have any political motivations, didn't really understand the technology using Bitcoin because it allowed them to do s…”

“When you look at it, there are a lot of lessons to be drawn for how it might be used elsewhere once, once the technology, once the protocol, once the code, once the infrastructure is improved, it will be able to compete in other places in similar ways”

“Frankly, the most popular way to get around the peso is the dollar, so there are already, there's already a whole infrastructure and world of money changers in Argentina who are changing between dollars and pesos and that's, That is something that sort of set …”

“I think that what Argentina has that a lot of other places don't have with dysfunctional economies is a very well-educated, literate tech-savvy population that, that knew how to embrace this technology and that had the skills to do that and a comfort with, The…”

“If the government does away with that, if the government begins to deal with inflation, then the advantages of Bitcoin are going to become a lot less significant.”

“I wouldn't argue that Argentina is the future of Bitcoin, or Argentina is paving the way for Bitcoin, you know, broader adoption by ordinary people. I just think it's a great experiment to watch, because it's the place where people are trying that right now”

“And do we think that you can stay invested in Argentina over long cycles? No. We're going to have to eventually take our money out of that.”