Argentine President Javier Milei said Friday that he plans to push ahead with monetary reforms after scoring his first win in Congress with the approval of landmark deregulation and fiscal measures, part of an economic program that turned the budget deficit into a surplus in his first six months in power.

“Fiscal consolidation is underway, the zero-deficit stage has already passed,” Milei said on LN+, a video news service of La Nación newspaper. “Now we go to the zero-issue stage. The change of monetary regime is coming. What we are aiming for is that the broad monetary base does not vary any more” with the printing of pesos, he said.

The president spoke a few hours after the lower house of Congress voted 147 to 107, with two absentees, in favor of the deregulation and fiscal reform bills in a bid to pull the country out of a financial crisis that began in 2018 and worsened last year. The bills, which were already approved in the upper house, now become law.

The right-wing president said more efforts will be made to increase the budget surplus, helped by what he expects to be a rebound in economic growth later this year.

This, Milei added, will help the sovereign reduce its peso-denominated debt and also make it possible for the central bank to boost international reserves, resulting eventually in the elimination of the tight controls it has in place on accessing foreign currencies. The controls have been a major holdback for investors to put money into the real economy, given that they cannot use the profits on their projects to pay foreign debt and dividends.

“Once we also manage to converge on inflation, when all these elements are met, the conditions will be in place to get out of the capital controls,” Milei said.

NEXT REFORMS

Milei called the approval of the two bills the end of the first stage of his government, with the second to focus on monetary policies and more structural reforms.

One of the reforms will focus on removing more regulations and will be led by Federico Sturzenegger, an economist and former central bank president who authored the deregulation and fiscal reform bills. Sturzenegger will take a ministerial post from this week, Milei said.

The next battery of reforms will seek 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.

“This also implies beginning to definitively end the problem of inflation,” he said. “When you have that finished, you can ensure that monetary issue is zero, we can go to the zero-issue law, where if you emit money you go to prison.”

These and other measures will allow the government to reduce taxes and enter into the third stage of his plans, which is “to start to grow robustly,” Milei added. He estimated that per capita GDP could “quadruple” in this third stage.

“Argentina will start to resemble countries like Germany, France, Italy,” he said.