Javier Milei took over an economy with inflation running at 13% a month and has it down to 2%, and Argentines have stopped voting on it.
The chainsaw was the point of the whole project, and it worked on the one measure it was aimed at. What voters now say they care about — jobs, wages, whether they can pay their debts — is the part that has gone the other way.
"With a grin, he told me, Get ready for Milei Reloaded."
Kinley Salmon is The Economist's Latin America correspondent. He has interviewed Milei twice, most recently sitting down with two colleagues in an office with a large gold chainsaw in it, and he also interviewed the man most likely to run against him.
I listened to the full segment so you can skip it.
Here are the 8 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Kinley Salmon, The Economist's Latin America correspondent, who interviewed President Javier Milei alongside two colleagues
🎙️ Host: Rosie Blau, who presents The Intelligence
👥 Also on: Henry Tricks and Abhishek Kumar, in the episode's other segments on LIV Golf and India's elephants
📰 Published: 9 September 2026 on the Economist Podcasts feed
🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | 📝 Transcript | ⏱️ 22 min
Key Takeaways
Inflation fell from 13% a month to 2%, and voters have moved on to jobs and wages
Growth is running for a second straight year, but it sits in oil, mining and agriculture, which hire few people
The inflation win cut poverty by about a third, to around 28% at the national poverty line
Washington's $20 billion swap line and direct peso buying turned a likely midterm defeat into a win
China renewed a swap line of its own last month, three years after Milei called its leadership assassins
Milei denies there is any trade-off between fighting inflation and growth at all
Salmon's read is that the returns on saying so are now diminishing, because voters have changed the subject
His net approval rating is close to minus 30 with a year to go
The person polling better than either main contender is a Trotskyite leftist
Myriam Bregman, in a field where Milei and Axel Kicillof are about equally disliked
He wants companies run by artificial intelligence to be given full legal rights
He says he will not change what he is doing just to win the election
1. The Gold Chainsaw
Salmon opened the segment with the object in the room rather than the politics.
The chainsaw is not a metaphor; it is furniture. "As we stepped into the office of President Javier Milei in Argentina, right in front of us was a large gold chainsaw with its teeth glinting at us"
Milei's reaction to it, as Salmon relayed the exchange: "I sat down with two colleagues to talk to Milei and he said to me, that is my favorite toy." Salmon glossed the object as "his famous campaign symbol for cutting spending, slashing taxes"
The program ran Milei's own answer under the narration. In the English rendering the president says there are still many expenses to lower and many taxes to lower, and asks whether the interviewer thinks he is going to give up
He told the interview he intends to use it harder after the election, not less. "And he told me in our interview that his chainsaw is working all day long and that he's looking forward to really letting it rip after he gets re-elected next year"
Salmon's read on how Milei looked, against his own earlier interview: "Milei gets energized about his chainsaws above all, but compared to when I last interviewed him back in late 2024, I saw him much tired at this time"
He added a physical observation and a temperamental one: "He seemed to be perhaps struggling with some back pain. He's still very capable of charms and jokes, but volatile as he was then, perhaps even more so"
The pitch for the next term is technological. "But some things certainly still energize him, and he says to me artificial intelligence in Argentina is going to be embraced like no else, and that will help the country become a world power like the United States, perhaps in just 20 years"
The line he ended on: "With a grin, he told me, Get ready for Milei Reloaded"
2. A Delicate Moment
Blau put it to Salmon that this was a very confident proposition a year out from an election, and asked how Argentina is actually doing.
Salmon's answer was that the position is fragile in both directions. "In reality, it's a delicate moment for Argentina and for Javier Milei"
He set the starting point first: "I mean, let's be clear, he inherited an awful economic mess. Inflation at 13% a month, all kinds of red tape across the economy"
The core achievement, in his own words: "And he's deregulated and he's pulled that inflation down impressively. It's down 2% per month now"
The political problem is that the reward has already been collected. "Voters rewarded that in midterms last year. But the thing is now they care more about jobs and their wages than they do about inflation"
The clock is the other half of it: "On that side, growth and jobs are struggling, and he's not got very long now to make further reforms that would help with that before this election in October next year"
What is at stake is bigger than one presidency, in Salmon's framing. "So this radical liberal economic experiment, which I think has fascinated a lot of people and inspired free marketers around the world, now hangs in the balance"
3. Poverty Down by a Third
Blau pushed back that Milei has had a lot of success in office, and Salmon agreed without qualification before returning to the caveat.
His answer began "Oh, he absolutely has. I think we should really recognize that improvement on inflation has been crucial to Argentines, even if their priorities are now changing"
The clearest measure of it is poverty rather than the price index. "That inflation improvement also has cut poverty in Argentina by about a third to around 28% at the national poverty line"
He would not let the point be shaded: "Those are big, real achievements"
The other constituency that is happy is the one that decides whether Argentina can borrow. "And financial markets, who are frankly a key player in the whole Argentine political economic dynamic, are really pleased"
4. AI Can Only Do Good
The segment played a stretch of Milei in Spanish on artificial intelligence, and Salmon translated the position rather than the sentence.
Milei's view, as Salmon put it, has no downside case in it. "He's also, on some things, a very optimistic guy. He's a huge techno-optimist. He says AI can only do good things. The only harm that can come from artificial intelligence is if states get in the way"
The policy that follows from it is unusual. "He wants to give artificial intelligence-run companies full legal rights"
Salmon treated this as of a piece with everything else rather than as an eccentricity: "So he's very optimistic and very committed to this free market vision in all its applications"
5. The $20B Trump Backstop
Asked what the foreign policy has been, Salmon described an alignment strategy that has already paid a measurable dividend.
The shape of it first: "Well, his foreign policy has been above all, just extremely tight alignment with the United States and Donald Trump, as well as very tight alignment with Israel"
The payoff came at the moment of maximum pressure, before the midterms. "The peso was in danger of collapsing and the United States stepped in with a $20 billion swap line and directly purchased the peso to back it up"
Salmon put the counterfactual plainly: "That frankly, I think helped stave off what could have been a really nasty defeat, possibly one that would have really made him a lame duck kind of a president and turned it into a strong win"
On China the position has reversed, and Salmon read that as pragmatism rather than inconsistency. "On the campaign trail back in 2023, he called the Chinese leadership assassins." In the clip the program played, Milei now says China is a great trading partner and points out that the United States trades with China too
The relationship has a number attached to it: "He now says working with them is very agreeable, he says we've deepened our trade relations, and that's paying off too. The Chinese renewed a $19 billion swap line just last month"
6. Jobs Are the Weak Spot
This is the section the rest of the segment turns on: the growth is real, and it is in the wrong places.
Salmon started with the good half. "Let's be clear, the country's on track for consecutive years of growth. That's actually a real rarity in Argentina, but it is much slower than planned"
The composition of that growth is the problem. "And that growth is concentrated in sectors like oil and mining and in agriculture. And the trouble is, those don't generate that many jobs. They're not that labor intensive"
The sectors that do hire are the ones going backwards: "And sectors that are labor intensive, like manufacturing or tourism, have really struggled"
The headline number he reached for is a private-sector one, not a public-sector one. "What's the result? 230,000 fewer private sector jobs than in 2023"
The public-sector cuts are the president's own boast, and Salmon reported them as such. "And he also boasts, we've also cut 80,000 plus public sector jobs. But that is hurting families, of course"
Pay has not recovered either: "And if you look at salaries in the formal private sector, they are still below where they were when Milei took office as well. And the public sector they're dramatically below"
Milei's answer to that, in Salmon's account, is that it is the intention. "He says, that's the point. That's what we've come here to do"
The measure Salmon offered for how households are actually coping is arrears. "If you look at what's happening in another way, nearly 6 million Argentines, are now more than 90 days behind on some kind of debt payment"
He tied it back to the anti-inflation policy: "And that's partly because Milei is so focused on inflation, he's kept interest rates really high"
The clip has Milei rejecting the framing outright — "In reality, that's a false dilemma" — and Salmon spelled the position out: "Now he frankly says there is no cost on the other side. He says my fight against inflation has not hurt growth at all. There's no direct trade-off there"
Salmon's own judgment is about politics rather than economics. "It looks to me like there are diminishing electoral returns at least to carrying on just so exclusively focused on inflation because voters say, I care about other things now"
7. Malvinas and the Fury
Blau raised the Falkland Islands from a British listener's point of view, noting that Milei had made interesting comments on them recently, and asked whether it came up.
It did, and the answer was not new: "It did come up and he was crystal clear to us. He says the Malvinas, as Argentines call them, are Argentine." The program played Milei's own phrasing, "Las Malvinas son Argentinas"
What changed came after the interview rather than in it. "That's a long standing position, but after our interview, he then ramped up this rhetoric even more in this national broadcast, threatened sanctions against oil companies that might operate there"
The escalation is now legal as well as rhetorical: "The government says it will file criminal charges against a company leading the first commercial oil drilling project in the Falklands"
Salmon read the timing as domestic. "Look, I think this is about distracting a little bit, trying to ramp up the base and maybe focus on something that people can get behind, even if they're not feeling so good in their wallet"
He connected it to the tone of the presidency generally — "But it's also indicative of the anger that there is with Milei. I mean, he raged against Argentine journalists to us" — and the clip carries Milei saying these are journalistic accusations and that everyone already knows how dirty the journalists in Argentina are
The behavior is routine rather than occasional. "He posts sometimes dozens of times a day on X in extreme terms. He calls Argentine journalists human shit and worse on a very regular basis. There is a fury about that"
8. Milei's Rivals Save Him
Blau asked how Salmon rates Milei's chances with a year to go.
The starting position is bad. "The worrying thing for Milei is that his net approval rating is close to minus 30, so that's a tough starting point"
Salmon described a candidate who does not sound consistent about it: "He oscillates from sounding super confident it'll be a walk in the park, but actually more often sounding kind of resigned"
The line Salmon found most striking is a refusal to campaign on anything else. "He says, I won't change what I'm doing just for the sake of winning an election"
Salmon's response to it: "That's quite an extraordinary thing to say when you consider that really the most important economic policy in some sense in the next 14 months is winning that election"
If he loses, Salmon said, the whole experiment "may be a footnote in history"
There is still runway: "There is still some time to get wages to improve, to get more jobs, to improve growth. And that might help him over the line"
What is actually keeping him in front is the opposition. "I think that his biggest advantage, arguably, is his rivals. The most likely challenger is Axel Kicillof. He's the governor of the province of Buenos Aires. That's where about 40% of Argentines live"
"But his negative ratings are about as low as Javier Milei's, and he says to us, we spoke to him too, that right now he's not a candidate, but he's associated with all the excesses of the past, of overspending, and then his opposition is also divided, and that I think helps Milei too"
The most surprising name in the polling is neither of them. "But one thing that really struck me is that when you look at approval ratings, the person with better ratings than either Kicillof or Milei is someone called Myriam Bregman. Well, she's a Trotskyite leftist"
"So the sense of division in the country is huge, and with kind of the main contenders so disliked, it's people like her, third party options that are eyeing a run"
His final call was a hedged one. "I think Milei is still the favorite, just. But as long as the economy is stuttering, it looks uncomfortably tight"
Bonus Insights
The interview was not a one-on-one. Salmon says he "sat down with two colleagues to talk to Milei", and the same reporting trip produced an interview with Kicillof as well
Milei's answers were played in his own Spanish underneath Salmon's narration, with the program supplying the English, so the president's words reach the listener through the show's rendering rather than directly
Blau framed the Falklands question as the thing British listeners think of when they think of Argentina at all, which is what put the Malvinas material into a segment otherwise about the economy
Salmon has a before-and-after on the man himself, having interviewed him in late 2024, and used it to report that Milei looked more tired and no less volatile
Salmon's bottom line is that Milei has won the argument he chose to fight and is losing the one Argentines have moved on to, and that with his net approval close to minus 30 a year out, the thing keeping him in front is a divided and equally disliked opposition rather than the record he wants to run on.
Books & Resources Mentioned
Javier Milei's liberal experiment is struggling (The Economist's written piece on the interview, carried in the episode's own notes)
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