Argentine President Javier Milei said Friday that he put former central bank president Federico Sturzenegger in charge of a new ministry for deregulation and transformation, as he seeks to drum up private investment to pull the country out of a long financial crisis.
Sturzenegger will work on “removing the obstacles that hold back the private sector,” including by making regulations easier to follow, the far-right libertarian president said in a decree that also created the new ministry.
Sturzenegger, who ran the central bank from 2015 to 2018 and has been called by his new boss as “the best economist on the planet,” will also seek to remove red tape and state overreach in his new role.
His appointment comes as Milei, a political novice, starts to get his proposed structural reforms approved after nearly seven months in power. On June 28, the lower house voted in favor of sweeping deregulation and fiscal reforms — authored by Sturzenegger — in what Milei called the first stage of a three-pronged effort to pull the country out of a financial crisis that began in 2018 and worsened last year.
The next step will involve monetary reforms to halt the printing of pesos, which the president has declared, along with a fiscal deficit, as the main reason behind Argentina’s longstanding economic woes.
This second stage will also include a battery of reforms to boost economic growth, create jobs and increase salaries and pensions, as well as reduce interest rates, improve access to credit and attract more investments. A third stage will see the economy grow robustly, Milei said last week.