Monday, July 18, 2011

cachorro

Es difícil exponer en arial 12 negro sobre blanco en el monitor lo jodido que es criar hijos a distancia pero creo que estás meando fuera del tarro nunca te dije que seas como yo porque no soy perfecto y vos tampoco lo que siempre te he dicho y lo seguiré haciendo es que tenés que pensar en tu futuro especialmente que entiendas que tus padres no van a estar toda la vida criándote, cosa que es lo mínimo que te puedo decir haciendo mi laburo de padre obviamente estás contestatario como todo muchacho de tu edad pero bueno ya pasará madurarás y quizás entiendas o mires las cosas desde otro punto de vista o quizás prefieras que te diga no hagas nada no labures ni estudies total sos uno más del millón que hacen eso es decir nada.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Fuí a la facultad, clase de Procesal Civil a las ocho de la mañana, pispeo el bar, lo veo a César C. sentado en una mesa, buen tipo.
Con gesto amistoso me acerco, me vió y meneando la cabeza mientras tomaba su café, dijo: “Están todos locos!”.
Me despabiló su comentario ambiguo y le pregunté:
"Se puede saber de que carajo estás hablando?”
a lo que respondió “no escuchaste la radio, boludo? invadimos Las Malvinas”…

Thursday, January 7, 2010

torpeza sin límites

Argentina's bank grab
The reserves, or your job

Jan 7th 2010 | PUNTA DEL ESTE
From The Economist print edition
The president’s ultimatum to her Central Bank chief

TO SUSTAIN its expansionary fiscal policies, Cristina Fernández’s government has developed an insatiable hunger for other people’s cash. First she ramped up taxes on farmers, then last year she nationalised private pension funds. Now she is trying to lay her hands on the Central Bank’s foreign-currency reserves.
AFP Redrado’s pointed defiance

Last month she issued a decree transferring $6.6 billion of the reserves to a fund to service the public debt. Although the government has run a (now diminishing) fiscal surplus for years, it cannot borrow freely in international capital markets. This is both because investors mistrust its policies and because it has yet to settle with bondholders who boycotted a previous debt restructuring in 2005 under Néstor Kirchner, Ms Fernández’s predecessor and husband.

The Central Bank is formally independent. By law any transfer of reserves requires authorisation by Congress. Martín Redrado, the bank’s governor, stalled, awaiting legal advice and the outcome of a legal challenge to the reserve grab by the opposition-controlled province of San Luis. On January 6th the government ordered Mr Redrado to resign. He refused, saying he would serve until his term ends in September.

“It wasn’t Redrado who accumulated the reserves,” said Aníbal Fernandez, the cabinet chief (who is not related to the president). “It was [the Kirchners’] government. In this country, it’s not the governor of the Central Bank that makes the decisions.” In fact it was Argentine exporters—not the government—whose labours accumulated the reserves. And Ms Fernández, who is deeply unpopular, is finding her decisions contested. In June the government lost its legislative majority in a mid-term election.

Mr Redrado has hitherto gone along with the Kirchners’ dash for growth, while trying quietly to moderate some of their policies. If he remains defiant on the reserves, Ms Fernández can oust him only by appealing to a special committee of Congress, which would probably be led by opposition legislators. Ironically, had she sought the approval of Congress for the reserve transfer she might well have got it. Few Argentine politicians are prepared to pay the political cost of spending cuts or tax rises to pay off bondholders. As it is she may have turned the Central Bank chief into a martyr for the cause of integrity in public policy.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Es la educación, estúpido!

Economix - New York Times Blog
October 6, 2009, 6:44 am
What Happened to Argentina?
By Edward L. Glaeser

Edward L. Glaeser is an economics professor at Harvard.

A century ago, there were only seven countries in the world that were more prosperous than Argentina (Belgium, Switzerland, Britain and four former English colonies including the United States), according to Angus Maddison’s historic incomes database. In 1909, per capita income in Argentina was 50 percent higher than in Italy, 180 percent higher than Japan, and almost five times higher than in neighboring Brazil. Over the course of the 20th century, Argentina’s relative standing in world incomes fell sharply. By 2000, Argentina’s income was less than half that of Italy or Japan.

The chart below shows the relationship between income in 1909 and income in 2000 in 1990 dollars, and Argentina is the extreme outlier. The gap between 2000 income and predicted economic success, based on 1909 income, is larger for Argentina than for any other country.

Why did that once-wealthy nation do so poorly?

In its pre-World War I heyday, Argentina thrived as a trading giant shipping beef and grain abroad. After World War II, formerly poor countries including Japan, Korea and Italy followed an export-led model to wealth. A combination of external shocks (two world wars and the Great Depression) and protectionism caused Argentina to turn inward.

Peronism was not only protectionist, but it also favored large state enterprises and significant regulation of the economy. Neither strategy has been particularly good for growth. Argentina’s inbred banking system has historically had trouble weathering severe shocks. Decades of political instability have made property rights insecure and investment unattractive.

Argentina was cursed with bad policies that bear much of the blame for the country’s problems, but why was Argentina’s public sector so problematic?

Those bad policies weren’t just bad luck. To understand Argentina’s political problems during the 20th century, we must look back to the Belle Epoque, and try to understand why, despite its wealth, Argentina was different from other wealthy countries, like the United States.

In a recent paper, Felipe Campante and I have taken an urban perspective on Argentine exceptionalism and compared Buenos Aires and Chicago in 1900.

In many ways, the two cities are strikingly similar. Chicago grew great in the 19th century as a conduit for the agricultural wealth of the American hinterland. In 1816, it cost as much to move goods 32 miles over land as to ship across the Atlantic. The enormous costs of shipping by land caused America’s population to perch on the Eastern Seaboard, dependent on an Atlantic lifeline. Over the 1800s, a great transportation network of canals and rails makes America’s rich farmland accessible. Cities like Chicago grew as the nodes of that network.

Chicago’s fortune was made by two canals, the Erie Canal and the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which turned Chicago into the linchpin on a great watery arc that runs from New York to New Orleans. Railroads complemented the waterways and enabled the rich farmland of Iowa to ships its corn, in porcine form, to eastern markets via Chicago. Chicago’s most famous 19th century industry was its stockyards, which thrived because of refrigerated rail cars that shipped slaughtered beef back east. Clothing employed even more Chicagoans, who were making garments for thousands of rural customers, supplied by Marshall Field, Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck.

The story of Buenos Aires is broadly similar. Like Chicago, the city was surrounded by a vast, fertile hinterland. Buenos Aires grew as a center for transporting agricultural products east. The frigorificos, refrigerated ships, greatly increased its ability to ship beef. Clothing was also Buenos Aires’s largest industry.

But there were also major dissimilarities between the two places.

Chicago was substantially wealthier, even a century ago. Capital per worker was more than twice higher in the Windy City. Chicago was a seedbed of technological innovations, including the skyscraper, the zipper and the electric washing machine. Buenos Aires’s entrepreneurs, such as the industrious Torcuato DiTella, often succeeded by importing American technologies, as DiTella did with gas pumps and refrigerators.

The greater levels of technological innovation in Chicago probably reflected the higher levels of education in the United States. Throughout the 19th century, Chicago was almost completely literate, because the rural migrants who came to the city had been well educated in the common schools that dotted America’s farmland. By contrast, more than a fifth of Buenos Aires’s population was illiterate until 1900, reflecting the far lower levels of education in rural Argentina.

As the next figure shows, no variable from 1900 better explains success in 2000 than investment in education.

Schooling is measured by the share of the relevant populations that was enrolled in primary, secondary or tertiary schooling. Argentina may have been rich, but it was not that well-educated. In 2000, Argentina was doing about as well as would be expected based on its education levels in 1900. Long-run national success is built on human capital, both because of the link between schooling and technology and because of the link between education and well-functioning democracy.

I will return to this link, and to the puzzle of Argentine exceptionalism, in a future post.

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Saturday, October 10, 2009

errores gramaticales!

bianual o bienal? insólitamente, los señores miembros del Congreso aparentan desconocer la diferencia entre una palabra y otra. Será que el pueblo tiene los representantes y gobernantes que se merece?