Argentina is on the brink of bankruptcy. Because that’s the name for where you are when you desperately need a promise of a bailout to buy time, while you may still need the full bailout later, as both the Financial Times and The Economist admit.

Due to an acute crisis, triggered by a local but crucial election defeat for the government of self-declared “anarcho-capitalist” and chainsaw artist Javier Milei, the country’s currency has now crashed and wobbled and its stock market plunged repeatedly.

Milei’s recent “crushing setback” (Al Jazeera) in the key province of Buenos Aires shell-shocked his supporters abroad: Bloomberg TV deplored a “big disappointing surprise for investors” and announced an “inflection point” for Argentina. With midterm elections pending there in late October, the Buenos Aires rout may well be a sign of worse to come for the West’s libertarian poster boy, namely a massive rejection by the national electorate. Importantly, Argentinians seem to agree: they see Milei’s Buenos Aires debacle as his first painful defeat, to be followed by more.

And many believe he will richly deserve all of it. Milei, after all, has not “only” been an ideologically bigoted wrecking ball, but also a purveyor of corruption, nepotism, and, last but not least, ruinous mass scamming. One of his party’s top candidates has just dropped out of an election campaign because of sleaze allegations clearly too true to be ignored. Milei’s sister Karina, whom he calls “the boss” (How’s that for unresolved childhood issues, Dr. Freud?), stands very plausibly accused of very shady deals with pharmaceutical companies (As they whisper in Brussels, “never go full von der Leyen!”). And Javier himself has played a nasty key role in a memecoin pump-and-dump scam that, according to Forbes, cost almost everyone who invested a total of over

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