President Cristina Kirchner orders state entities to buy from Argentinian companies
Last edited Fri Jul 20, 2012, 01:44 PM - Edit history (1)
The administration of President Cristina Kirchner has also decreed that government employees use flagship carrier Aerolineas Argentinas or its subsidiary Austral for business travel, according to the official gazette.
The government will pay employee salaries via Banco Nacion, the largest bank in the country. Leasing contracts for vehicles must be obtained through a bank subsidiary, AP reports.
Existing financial contracts between state entities and private institutions will be honored but not extended.
Faced with rising energy costs and capital flight, Buenos Aires has put in place a number of protectionist measures, including the seizure of a 51pc stake in YPF, formerly a subsidiary of Spanish oil firm Repsol.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/9413865/President-Cristina-Kirchner-orders-state-entities-to-buy-from-Argentinian-companies.html
Its also not quite the bed of roses there that some here on DU use to others when discussing Greece for example :
From Feb, '12 : The price of cooking the books.
HISTORY has left Argentines with more than their share of economic trauma. Having twice suffered destructive bouts of hyperinflation in the late 1980s, they are sensitive to rising prices. When they spot inflation their instinct is to dump the peso and buy dollars. But after the economy collapsed in 2001-02, horror at mass unemployment temporarily eclipsed the public's fear of inflation. That has been the successful political calculation of the president, Cristina Fernández, and her late husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner. For years they stoked an overheating economy with expansionary policies. Faced with the resulting rise in inflation, their officials resorted to price controls—and to an extraordinarily elaborate deception to conceal the rise.
Since 2007, when Guillermo Moreno, the secretary of internal trade, was sent into the statistics institute, INDEC, to tell its staff that their figures had better not show inflation shooting up, prices and the official record have parted ways. Private-sector economists and statistical offices of provincial governments show inflation two to three times higher than INDEC's number (which only covers greater Buenos Aires). Unions, including those from the public sector, use these independent estimates when negotiating pay rises. Surveys by Torcuato di Tella University show inflation expectations running at 25-30%.
In this section
PriceStats, a specialist provider of inflation rates which produces figures for 19 countries that are published by State Street, a financial services firm, puts the annual rate at 24.4% and cumulative inflation since the beginning of 2007 at 137%. INDEC says that the current rate is only 9.7%, and that prices have gone up a mere 44% over that period (see chart).
INDEC seems to arrive at its figures by a pick-and-mix process of tweaking, sophistry and sheer invention. Graciela Bevacqua, the professional statistician responsible for the consumer-price index (CPI) until Mr Moreno forced her out, says that he tried to get her to omit decimal points, not round them. That sounds minor—until you calculate that a 1% monthly inflation rate works out at an annual 12.7%, whereas 1.9% monthly compounds to 25.3%.
http://www.economist.com/node/21548229
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