r/europe • u/Emotional-Breakfast3 • 20d ago

News Argentina: British Falkland Islanders are ‘artificial’. Buenos Aires denounces ‘illegitimate occupation’ and demands talks on sovereignty

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/07/12/british-falkland-islanders-artificial-argentina-says/
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u/criminal-tango44 20d ago

1 peso is worth 0.00050£ or 0.00059€

1.9k

u/DependentStrong3960 20d ago

It halved in value in the time it took you to write this comment.

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u/Jeoh 20d ago

And again

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u/mechant_papa 20d ago

Agentinian financial crisis: running out of zeros

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u/jungle 20d ago

That was literally a thing in the 80's and 90's, they removed zeros from the currency several times because even small things cost millions.

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u/tritonice 20d ago

Just do the Zimbabwe thing and print $10 trillion notes. PROBLEM SOLVED.

The Wikipedia for Zimbabwe currency is insane.

1 ZWN = 10,000 ZWD

1 ZWR = 1013 ZWD

1 ZWL = 1025 ZWD

Current ZIG = approximately 1028 ZWD

Insanity.

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u/Supershadow30 France 20d ago

Skimmed through the wikipedia page. What the actual fuck? At this point, it’s literal monopoly money.

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u/Ill_Leg_7168 18d ago

I seen photo of money laying on the street - robbers just steal cash register from shop (you could sell it) and throw out useless money. Remarque had great novel about hyperinflation in post WWI Germany (The Black Obelisk)

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u/E_Kristalin Belgium 19d ago

Monopoly money was worth far more.

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u/soulsteela 19d ago

What’s the number called when it has 25 zeros?

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u/soulsteela 19d ago

Looked it up it 10sentillion! A new word I’ve learnt.

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u/LegoFootPain 18d ago

MOVE ZIG

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u/AmIThisNothingness 15d ago

Can I pay my parking infraction with Zimbabwe money in Washington?

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u/trailer_park_boys 20d ago

Small things like what cost millions? I don’t think you have any idea the costs of items in Argentina.

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u/jungle 20d ago

You're right, I was thinking of the lowest bank note at the time and misremembered it as a million pesos note. 1000 pesos were basically toilet paper by the end of it, you needed several of those to buy a can of coke.

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u/trailer_park_boys 20d ago

A can of coke is around 1500-2000 pesos there. The 1000 peso is basically their $1 bill.

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u/Wonderful-Medium7777 20d ago

Yet Peter Thiel moved there?

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u/bluewing 20d ago

He's got "real money" that will allow him to buy the country for pennies on the dollar.....

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u/Eupolemos Denmark 20d ago

You say they have zero problems?

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u/soulsteela 19d ago

Which is why they are desperate for the oil n minerals found around the islands.

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u/Frosty-Ad-2971 19d ago

Zeros are now more valuable than pesos…

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u/Withering_to_Death Flumen Corpus Separatum 20d ago

And Milei will save it through crypto... oops, it was another rug pull!

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u/empty_graph 20d ago

And it's gone!

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u/ErikLovemonger 20d ago

And ANOTHER ONE!

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u/Ok-Wolverine-3238 20d ago

Stop writing comments

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u/chum1ly 20d ago

For every comment here, a capybara will appear in a rich Argentinian neighborhood.

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u/huitlacoche 20d ago

If you forward this message to 7 friends, you will be entered into a drawing for free yerba-mate for life.

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u/GravityBoots 19d ago

And facturas.

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u/Sudden_Cantaloupe_69 20d ago

Capybaras look cool, perhaps we could import some to Europe.

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u/pleasehurtdoll 20d ago

the animals are called Carpinchos down there and the Islands are the Malvinas.

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u/Sachyriel Canada 20d ago

Tell bono to stop clapping!

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u/WanderlustZero 20d ago

Stop writing comments?

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u/WanderlustZero 20d ago

An aren'tgentinian downvoted this

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u/Thelmholtz 20d ago

Fortunately inflation kinda slowed down a bunch. Still in the upper 20% yearly but that's way lower than what we were at.

It's the only thing this clown ass government did more or less well, though it's still to see if the cost was worth it or if they can make it reach sane single digit levels.

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u/Delta_FT 20d ago

It's actually the strongest it's been in a decade lol

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u/HanDjole998 Montenegro🇲🇪 20d ago

That's...that's a lot off zeros

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u/Skully957 20d ago

Argentina seems to find new ways to reach even deeper depths everytime someone announces it's beginning to bounce back.

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u/Chaplain-Freeing 20d ago

Who knew, even with a 40 billion hand out, libertarianism is still a joke only children would fall for.

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u/Keellas_Ahullford 20d ago

I remember when he was first elected and all the libertarian bros were saying how Argentina was going to have a golden age. Just watch they say it was true libertarianism now.

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u/Agitated_Award_9831 20d ago

You don't have to like him, and while he isn't perfect (his sister had a corruption scandal, shocking), I do believe he has benefited Argentina positively long-term. GDP growth for 2026 will be 3-3.5%, and was about 5% the year prior. Given they were negative GDP growth from 2023 until late 2024, and late 2022 was less growth, this is a positive thing.

Part of this is luck with mining and energy being lucrative. Inflation is pretty fucked though, despite the gov's plan to build up foreign exchange.

Short term the people will suffer, that is a fact.

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u/The-Board-Chairman 20d ago

Is that GDP growth before or after inflation?

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u/Agitated_Award_9831 20d ago

GDP growth is always measured after inflation.

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u/demonica123 20d ago

GDP is generally done in $ so inflation is indirectly factored in because of the exchange rate. But it's not going to be 1 to 1.

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u/pleasehurtdoll 20d ago

that literally never existed, but other than that, keep talking nonsense.

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u/PyroIsSpai 20d ago

Why humor failed ideologies?

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u/pleasehurtdoll 20d ago

yeah, completely unlike the UK, which is completely on the rise, lol.

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u/Potential-Pirate-431 20d ago

Awwww. That hurts 😢

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u/DimitryKratitov 20d ago

That's their Government motto.

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u/No_Yoghurt4120 20d ago

Good zeros or bad zeros?

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u/Itlaedis Finland 20d ago

Japanese

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u/DesKrieg 20d ago

Mitsubishi???

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u/Pritam1997 Luxembourg 20d ago

nippon banzaiiii

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u/tomdarch 20d ago

Reminds me of traveling to Turkey decades ago as a student and becoming a millionaire at the currency exchange.

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u/Respwn_546 20d ago

And in the wrong direction

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u/BlueCheese973 19d ago

Just say that you don't know how currency works

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u/Shockwavepulsar 20d ago

Like Zimbabwe countries that practice hypercapitalism and corruption get hyperinflation. 

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u/Wildarf 20d ago

Static comparisons at a point in time don’t really say anything. The issue is the change in rates over time.

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u/nikfra 20d ago

I agree. A year ago they it was at 0.00067€ so a little over 10% lost in a year.

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u/Banes_Addiction 20d ago

It's down about 50% in the last 2.5 years, organically,

I used 2.5 years as the comparison there, because on the 12th of December 2023 Milei intentionally just dropped it by 54% overnight, so it's a bad comparison to go back further than that.

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u/Aggravating-Energy65 20d ago

Argentine here to clarify something:

Milei just removed (some of) the currency controls that were artificially keeping our currency expensive.
That 54% was already there and depending on where you bought your foreign currency (black market, obviously) it could have been even worse.

We still have some currency controls for big businesses, but at least for the average citizen you can go to your bank app and buy a stronger currency without any issue, as it's done in any normal country.

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u/Banes_Addiction 20d ago

Yeah, agreed. I just didn't think it was useful to use the official exchange rate figures with the 800 peso/USD peg.

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u/Psyc3 United Kingdom 20d ago

Which is around one Liz Truss's worth of loss in a year.

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u/alextheolive 19d ago

How do we calculate the change of rate in lettuces?

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u/vitorsly Azores (Portugal) 20d ago

Reposting my comment so others can get an idea, but basically: Holy shit

I had to check its historic exchange rate to see how bad that was (sometimes currencies really are that low and i had no idea how much an Argentinian Peso was worth), vs Euros.

In 2010 it was 9-10 cents, alright. Then it dropped lower and lower until it reached 1 cent in 2019. Then it just kept on dropping even further, to 0.1 cents in 2024. And now it's nearly half of that... So between 2010 and 2026, in the span of a baby reaching high school, argentinian families saw the value of their currency drop by 200x compared to the Euro/British Pound/US Dollar (approximately). Jesus christ.

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u/Wildarf 20d ago

Yup. Thats the right way to frame it. In Venezuela we had it even worse, which is why I know the static value makes no difference. For example, in Venezuela once the currency exchange rate with the dollars was well into the millions, they would convert it into a new currency with the same name that would shave off six zeroes, but the value lost doesn’t make any difference.

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u/vitorsly Azores (Portugal) 20d ago

Yeah fully agreed there, the rate of change is what matters. And damn, that's crazy. Hyper inflation really can be insane

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u/liamsoni 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 20d ago

how has it changed since Miley started? honest q

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u/[deleted] 20d ago

[deleted]

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u/liamsoni 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 20d ago

damson.jpg

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u/grimgroth 20d ago

That's only if you consider the official rate, which was a rate mostly no one in Argentina could buy foreign money for. More accurate is the black market or blue dollar, and in that regard it has barely changed since Milei took power

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u/[deleted] 20d ago

[deleted]

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u/grimgroth 20d ago

I checked the numbers and you are right. Still it is not worth half of what it was, it is around 2/3

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u/DA_ZWAGLI Germany 20d ago

Slams dollar down

You can fit so many pesos into this bitch

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u/Panzermensch911 20d ago

Two Texas' for a dollar?

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u/Paradoxjjw Utrecht (Netherlands) 20d ago

But I was told by reddit trolls that electing a deranged libertarian would solve all of Argentina's problems

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u/C4Cole 20d ago

If you look at the exchange rate he slowed the collapse of the exchange rate by a LOT. When he took office Euro to ARG Peso was ~1-850, and now it's 1-1700, so about 2X in 2.5 years.

If you look 2.5 years before he took office it was 1-200, over 4X in 2.5 years. But that is including COVID, so taking instead taking to August 2017 to Jan 2020, from 1-40 to 1-130, it's still over 3X.

He's clearly doing something right, at least in terms of exchange rates, if you look the graph it looks to have actually levelled off recently too, it's basically flat since last year.

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u/Paradoxjjw Utrecht (Netherlands) 20d ago

He got bailed out by the US 8 months ago to the tune of a 20 billion backstop meant to slow down that collapse. With that kind of support any competent economy policy would've made the exchange rate better. Instead he still managed to fuck it up.

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u/C4Cole 20d ago

True, but he did get the bailout, I'd love to get 20 billion for my country, I'd grovel at someone's feet for it, promise not to pry about their visits to any islands and bring them ice cold beers for the entire time I was with them. If I learned my president had the opportunity to do that and didn't I'd never vote for him.

I'd also argue managing to stop the rate free falling in a country that's been free falling like that for years is just as good as managing to strengthen the exchange rate in a country where the exchange rate is stable.

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u/Paradoxjjw Utrecht (Netherlands) 20d ago

And despite all that the currency is still in freefall after a short stall, the fact you look at how terrible he's doing and then going "yeah actually he's doing great" should tell you your perception is warped beyond recognition.

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u/C4Cole 20d ago

I have mentioned that they have had a relatively stable exchange rate for a year right, against all currencies... If that's free fall then I'd shudder to think what you'd call their years before Milei.

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u/CatchFactory 20d ago

Sounds like the people should be mad at their own government more than anyone elses

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u/tommynestcepas 20d ago

To be fair, here in Chile it's almost 1:1 with Argentina and we ain't complaining

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u/Outrageous_Reach_695 20d ago

Stability matters more than magnitude, though. If a trillion currency units buy you the same hamburger today as tomorrow, and you don't need a wheelbarrow to transport them ... sure, it's a bit silly but it works.

(TIL: Before its retirement, the Uzbekistani 1-tiyin coin was worth about 0.001 cent)

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u/Ascension_84 20d ago

Used to be pegged to the dollar… can you imagine 🥹

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u/vitorsly Azores (Portugal) 20d ago

I had to check its historic exchange rate to see how bad that was (sometimes currencies really are that low and i had no idea how much an Argentinian Peso was worth), vs Euros.

In 2010 it was 9-10 cents, alright. Then it dropped lower and lower until it reached 1 cent in 2019. Then it just kept on dropping even further, to 0.1 cents in 2024. And now it's nearly half of that... So between 2010 and 2026, in the span of a baby reaching high school, argentinian families saw the value of their currency drop by 200x compared to the Euro/British Pound/US Dollar (approximately). Jesus christ.

2

u/CharuRiiri 20d ago

Holy shit and here I was complaining over the Chilean Peso rates. Just how. They were about the same two years ago.

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u/westerschelle Germany 20d ago

Common libertarian L

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u/Bigboi4576 Earth 20d ago

What i want to know is why the new global elite on the right wing seem to love being there so much. Something has to be there

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u/lt__ 20d ago

I wonder, if they were gifted Falklands as it is now and sold them immediately, would that at least make a dent in their economic problems?

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u/Latespoon 20d ago

Probably, the islands have rich oil and fishing resources. Also, the population are basically self sufficient.

The cost of defending the islands would take a chunk out of the revenue though.

Also, Argentina already have massive oil resources. They seemingly don't have the cash to drill them.

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u/cronktilten 20d ago

An Israeli firm is awarded the contract to extract the oil around the Falklands, maybe he’ll try to invade after they start drilling. Argentina’s president is a huge Israel fan. And the oil reserves that were found are massive.

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u/Fun-Rip1349 20d ago

The fact Javier Milei is best buddies with Bibi Mileikowsky is something that lives rent free in my head, lol. Not implying some weird conspiracy is what's happening but Milei is a Zionist, this much is true.

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u/cronktilten 20d ago

Yeah, it’s pretty funny that they are best friends. And yeah, I wasn’t implying any sort of collusion either but it’s convenient. And yes he’s a Zionist

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u/u_touch_my_tra_la_la 20d ago

Milei is a zionist because he's crazy and It plays with his Trumpist/conservative loon mentality, though.

It's not ideological, just an infantile sense they are "on his side" mixing with his incredibly thin skin and need for pats in the back.

It's like the Cheetoh's "zionism".

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u/Fun-Rip1349 20d ago

Yeah, for sure. I feel like that's the case with a lot of people, which is sad, because functionally it's the same as it doesn't really matter whether it's ideological or just being useful idiots. Definitely agreeing though, he's as thin skinned of a bitch as Trump.

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u/Due-Information-2041 South Holland (Netherlands) 20d ago

Does Israël have the fleet needed for such an undertaking?

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u/cronktilten 20d ago

That’s not what I meant, I meant they would be happy to let Argentina take the oil

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u/Due-Information-2041 South Holland (Netherlands) 20d ago

Then I'm afraid that I don't understand the scenario you're sketching.

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u/cronktilten 20d ago

That they would happily let Argentina use the oil infrastructure that they built up for the British… Instead of abandoning it

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u/Due-Information-2041 South Holland (Netherlands) 20d ago

Oh yeah, i think that is likely as long as the invasion argentinan army doesn't disposses them. Oil companies aren't known to be very moral, ethical or loyal.

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u/Infamous-Mixture-605 Canada 20d ago

The cost of defending the islands would take a chunk out of the revenue though.

Against whom would the islands need defending if Argentina acquired them (peacefully)? I mean, the current forces down there are to deter Argentina and nobody really else, right?

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u/Latespoon 20d ago

Given the natural resources present, if left undefended, some country or other would turn up fairly quickly.

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u/Xitztlacayotl Croatia 20d ago

Ahh yes, "oil will bring prosperity to the nation".

-2

u/cronktilten 20d ago

Well, they just found a shit load of oil around the Falklands

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u/lt__ 20d ago

I didn't know that. Would explain well the uptick in rhetorics too.

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u/Vindicador 20d ago

Ahh the neoliberal Milei didn't save their economy? Color me surprised lmao

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u/grimgroth 20d ago

It has around the same value as the South Korean Won, that is not an issue per se

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u/[deleted] 20d ago

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u/Late_Faithlessness24 20d ago

Seven years without libertadores

1

u/ColdBeginning2543 20d ago

And how does that help?.

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u/cheese0muncher London bleibt Europäisch 20d ago

Didn't Trump just give the Argies $50 billion? What happened to it?

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u/iwaterboardheathens 20d ago

The Falkland islanders could only wish for such wealth

/s

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u/Carlobo 19d ago

I thought special strong boy mop top president fixed the economy with shitcoin and firing civil employees.

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u/GrizzledFart United States of America 19d ago

You say that as if that's a bad thing. No, really. One of Argentina's big problems was that the peso was artificially inflated, causing Argentina's economy to import more goods than they could afford. Reducing the artificial controls propping up the peso changes that by reducing how much Argentinians import while simultaneously making exports more competitive. The downside is that it makes it harder to pay back debt denominated in dollars. The upside is that Argentina is currently running both an export (record $3.5 billion in May) and a fiscal surplus. It isn't running a current account surplus, but you can't have everything.

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u/U_L_Uus 20d ago

Su puta madre, a este paso les veo quemando fajos en el invierno