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Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M

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Re: Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M

#181

Post by coffeebeqn »

Daishiman wrote: post #96
xrd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do have to admit more and more Friedman seems like he is more intent on building his subscriber count than actually asking tough questions. I can't say I feel like his fact checking is worth anything if it ever was. I should have known better.

Friedman is, like many people in this age of podcasters and influencers, another fool who's not only out of his depth in most interviews, but too self-centered to do anything to change it. His political analysis when interviewing people in that area is laughable. When interviewing chess players it's clear even to me, a mediocre player who barely reaches 1500 in lichess, that he's totally out of his depth and wasting…

Dwarkesh is basically doing what Lex tried to do early on before he became Rogan-lite. Looking at Lex’s range of topics in the last year it’s no wonder he’s out of his depth

Re: Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M

#182

Post by Daishiman »

Panzer04 wrote: post #135
dysoco wrote: post #69

Just to clarify, here are some important differences compared to the Trump case: 1. Milei did not sell this as a memecoin at all, unlike Trump, he sold it as a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises". 2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well. 3. 80%…

Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy. It turns out it doesn't take much to appear to be an economic genius - just stop spending money the government doesn't have and get rid of onerous market regulations (eg. rent controls). I'm in support of social spending to support those in need, but it's clear Argentina was moving ever-further aw…

> Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy.

Installed industrial capacity at its lowest, real cost in USD through the roof, large corporations that have been around for _decades_ shutting down because of a lack of demand, the shutdown of government programs for vaccine distribution and HIV immune therapy, the complete and absolute mismanagement around forest fires, and the lowest spending in science in the past 20 years.

There is not a single metric in which the country is better off. A couple bankers and mining corporations are doing great. For everyone else, the cost of living is unbearably high and productivity low.

Re: Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M

#183

Post by coffeebeqn »

Aurornis wrote: post #110
hermanubis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US you can’t grant coins any ownership or benefits that might vary in value. Meme coins are the only legal crypto so that’s all you get. It’s like Obama only legalizing giant pickup trucks.

We had an entire saga of ICOs launch and fail to deliver value. The notion that laws are preventing a golden age of crypto prosperity doesn’t make any sense. There are numerous countries where these coins can operate and they still don’t deliver any of these claims. > It’s like Obama only legalizing giant pickup trucks. What a weird claim. I assume you’re talking about CAFE regulations, but with an extremist conserva…

Has anything really changed since the ICOs? It’s just the same scams being wrapped up slightly differently but in the end 99.999% of these coins are net negative value to the world and their “investors”

Re: Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M

#184

Post by Daishiman »

otherme123 wrote: post #160
dysoco wrote: post #69

Just to clarify, here are some important differences compared to the Trump case: 1. Milei did not sell this as a memecoin at all, unlike Trump, he sold it as a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises". 2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well. 3. 80%…

> he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters. Oh, could he be a lot further from the truth! He could have done at least a couple of orders of magnitude worst with inflation (it was 300% and rising in its peak la…

> In the same link, economy is growing/expected at 4.5% this year.

We have had these projections for every government since 2001 that have been sheer conjecture just like in 2017. This means nothing.

> This is the fallacy of composition: "is he was wrong about this then it is wrong about absolutely everything he does"

Is is obvious that you have never seen the man tweet or be interviewed about anything of substance. He is a sheer, utter moron, who holds a fake doctorate from a degree mill and master's from a third-rate university that is notorious for being singled-out in hiring applications that explicitly exclude its graduates for how bad it is.

I have seen said applications when looking at job boards in the early aughts.

Re: Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M

#185

Post by watwut »

xrd wrote: post #15
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is horribly embarassing He made a mistake and backtracked instead of instinctively doubling down. Count your blessings.

Sorry, when you are the president you don't get that leeway to make mistakes and then correct them by saying "sorry, my bad!" No way. If I'm just a blogger on Twitter, then sure. It is hard to tell whether the US president is more than an effective tweeter. That distinction is important to me.

I mean, the standard for politicians, especially US ones is to never ever admit mistake. If they do, they get no leeway. However, if they double down, they get their camp defend them up to absurdum.

So maybe, the "sorry, my bad" is the superior way about mistakes.

Re: Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M

#186

Post by concordDance »

karparov wrote: post #162
Panzer04 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever the stupidity around this memecoin, it's hard to argue he isn't doing something to help the argentinian economy. It turns out it doesn't take much to appear to be an economic genius - just stop spending money the government doesn't have and get rid of onerous market regulations (eg. rent controls). I'm in support of social spending to support those in need, but it's clear Argentina was moving ever-further aw…

> stop spending money the government doesn't have That shows quite the misconception about what "money" actually is.

Isn't this kind of statement metaphorical?

The literal thing that happens is your country starts spending a greater and greater proportion of revenue servicing its debt (and eventually defaults), but this is less snappy to say.

Re: Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M

#187

Post by coffeebeqn »

JavierFlores09 wrote: post #146
dysoco wrote: post #69

Just to clarify, here are some important differences compared to the Trump case: 1. Milei did not sell this as a memecoin at all, unlike Trump, he sold it as a "financial instrument to help finance small Argentinan enterprises". 2. Trump tweeted about $TRUMP BEFORE stepping into office, Milei is already the president of Argentina. This constitutes an obvious ethical violation, and possibly a legal one as well. 3. 80%…

> If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the government right now is on other matters. This is a hasty generalization; while I agree on the fact that Milei was incompetent in promoting a memecoin as a financial instrument, that doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad economist all of the sudden, nor that the things he has done for Argen…

How would he not be? If he did zero due diligence on this and then pitched it to his countrymen as an investment. Incredibly poor judgement no?

Re: Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M

#188

Post by impossiblefork »

csomar wrote: post #83
impossiblefork wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ordinary currencies have value due to the enormous debt in it. If people fail to obtain units of the currency, they default on obligations that have much greater value than the value of the all the cash in the currency. Thus in an ordinary currency the incentive isn't to ignore it, or to sell, but to hoard it so that people can't obtain the money to pay their loans in order to create a crisis so that they can obtain…

Most people don't realize that governments can't just "print" currencies and the few that do (ie: Turkey, Argentina, etc...) have chronic hyperinflation. The US went a bit loose with supply and it already came back biting and still to this day struggling with the higher interest. The government does constantly devalue the currency, though. It does it at an imperceptible pace to not scare the chickens and make busines…

Yes, but when demand for the currency leads to a prices increasing,such as from an attempted corner, then you do not destroy price stability because the person operating the corner is buying the cash with something.

The money-printing used to break a corner can in principle be small and you can even have an inflation target of zero and still print money to break such corners.

What I want to emphasize with this though, is the source of a currency's value. The collateral of the debt of the loans denominated in it and the social and economic consequences to individuals of defaulting on loans in it. That is the end-source of demand for a currency, and that guaranteed demand is so great that it makes attempting to corner the market in the currency make sense.

If you cornered the market in bitcoin, there's no one who would have to buy even one. That shows how little bitcoin is worth, i.e. zero.

Re: Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M

#189

Post by Daishiman »

Xuban wrote: post #157
lovich wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I hope this helps people from outside Argentina get another view of Javier Milei, I've read way too many uninformed comments here on Hacker News and other sites about how he's a genius in economy and he's helping Argentina's economy, and that cannot be further from the truth sadly. If he made such a blunder in finance which supposedly is one of his specialties just imagine how incompetent he and most of the governme…

I don't think this is the approach if you want people to side against Milei. His economic results are crystal clear: inflation is way down, the economy is growing, percentage of poor people is down, the debt and the stock market are way up, salaries are up and so on.

> inflation is way down

Inflation is still far higher than it was 15 years ago without contractive policies that are destroying the industrial fabric of the country, and the local understanding of economist that actually know a thing or two is that there is inflationary inertia that will not be solved by the current policies.

> the economy is growing

By no means is the economy growing; industrial capacity is down. The nominal price of goods is going up and the cost of living is going up which appears in some metrics as more money moving in the economy, alebeit for drastically lower production as the real price in US dollars has doubled across every product line. The indexes that show progress use outdated purchasing baskets.

> percentage of poor people is down

Poverty went drastically up at the beginning of his mandate and still has not recovered baseline values. Most poverty indicators continue to undercount the impact of the cost of food, medical insurance and services, which hit poor homes disproportionately. This can be observed by the fact that medicine and food consumption are the categories whose consumption has been hit the hardest.

> salaries are up

Registered salaries using indices that have no accomodated for the changes in inflationary inertia are not very useful. [Consumption, however, is the lowest it's been in 20 years with no sign of recovery](https://www.infobae.com/economia/2025/01/15/el-consumo-masiv...).

Re: Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M

#190

Post by Daishiman »

levanten wrote: post #169
TZubiri wrote: post #145

I seem to be in the minority here, and I would definitely be framed as a supporter for saying this, but I'm a nuanced person. He is more of an idiot than a scammer, legally I think the term is negligence instead of fraud. Having recognized that he caused damage by negligence, additionally I think he was a victim too, he was scammed out of political capital and reputation. I don't think he was in on it, although defin…

I dont know which scenario is worse for a president, an experienced economist like him not understanding what he was endorsing or being part of the scam.

He is not an experienced economist. He holds a Master's from a third-rate private university and a doctorate from a degree mill. This myth needs to die.
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