NY Times, June 26, 2002 Blows Keep Coming for an Argentina Long in Crisis By LARRY ROHTER
BUENOS AIRES, June 25 — The president says it may be impossible to reach any agreement with the International Monetary Fund, the head of the central bank is giving up and going home, and the economy minister embarked tonight on a desperate quest to pry $18 billion from foreign lenders. For Argentina, an already disastrous economic crisis is suddenly threatening to become even more calamitous. "Argentina needs a very rapid agreement, but it doesn't depend on us," a dejected President Eduardo Duhalde said in a television appearance here late on Monday. "I hope we don't have to wait until September, because the situation in the region is getting worse every day." Mr. Duhalde spoke shortly after Mario Blejer, the president of the central bank and a former I.M.F. official with extensive contacts on Wall Street, said he was stepping down. His departure leaves the economy minister, Roberto Lavagna, who departed tonight for three days of meetings with the country's creditors in New York and Washington, as the undisputed chief of the government's economic team. The resignation of Mr. Blejer, 53, an economist with a doctorate from the University of Chicago, was not a great surprise. His health problems and his desire to rejoin his family, which lives in the United States, were widely known here, and he had earlier told Mr. Duhalde that he would stay in his post only until an agreement could be reached with the fund. But clashes with Mr. Lavagna, especially over how to end a freeze on bank deposits that has crippled Argentina's banking system since December, hastened Mr. Blejer's decision; he is to leave his post at the end of the week. Investors reacted by pushing the value of the Argentine peso down 2.5 percent today to 3.86 to the dollar; it was pegged at one to the dollar for a decade until early January. Mr. Blejer is to be succeeded by his deputy, Aldo Pignanelli, a little-known Peronist party loyalist who played a role in recent efforts to keep several banks from collapsing. In his letter of resignation, Mr. Blejer complained that the central bank's "independence has been weakened repeatedly in recent times" and urged the government not to "submit it to self-interested pressures." full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/26/business/worldbusiness/26ARGE.html Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
