EP358 · Economy · first published 2025-11-04
Champagne for Milei's win | Aleksi Tolvanen, Amos Ahola | Negotiator 358
Aleksi Tolvanen and Amos Ahola on the election win of Javier Milei's party in Argentina. Tolvanen had forecast 40% for La Libertad Avanza back in August, and the best passage in the episode is why 40 was the decisive number: it secures the presidential veto and closes off the juicio político route. The second core observation inverts the usual framing — Argentina's public debt relative to GDP is not exceptionally large; the problem is a default history that blocks refinancing. It closes on the Finnish State Treasury's interest-rate strategy and what should have been modelled. Published 4 November 2025.
Champagne for Milei’s win | Aleksi Tolvanen, Amos Ahola
Summary: In episode 358 Sami Miettinen talks to Aleksi Tolvanen and Amos Ahola about the election win of Javier Milei’s party in Argentina, and about what can and cannot be read across to Finland. Published 4 November 2025.
A note on reading this. This is an episode recorded in a celebratory mood, and it shows: the speakers are openly market-liberal and comment sharply on Finnish political debate. This article sorts the arguments and marks who said what. It does not reproduce the personal jabs and takes no position on who is right.
The guests
Aleksi Tolvanen is the Argentina specialist here: a background in economics and business, a second master’s degree from Spain, fluent Spanish and a long-standing libertarian position. He follows the Argentine economy in Spanish-language sources in his own time, which shows in the episode — he is the only one who refers to Argentine institutions by their own names.
Amos Ahola had been on the channel roughly a year earlier discussing the odds of Milei succeeding, and he opens by conceding he was wrong: he had suspected the public would not tolerate the adjustment long enough to reach an election. “It restores my faith in democracy a little.”
A third name worth being careful with is Ville Tolvanen — a different person from this episode’s guest. Aleksi Tolvanen’s appearances are collected on his own guest page.
The forecast that landed
Tolvanen says he forecast around 40% for La Libertad Avanza and around 30% for the Peronists at the end of August 2025. In between came the Buenos Aires provincial election, in which LLA managed a little over 30% and the Peronists were strong — which made the forecast look bad.
His explanation for why the provincial result did not invalidate the forecast is structural rather than rhetorical: the anti-Peronist force in Argentina has become libertarian- and LLA-led, so LLA now has to absorb the support of the centre-right parties that used to carry that role. A provincial election and a parliamentary election are therefore not the same measurement.
Why 40% specifically was the decisive number
This is the analytically tightest stretch of the episode, and it runs as three points.
1. The presidential veto. With these chamber compositions the Peronist opposition cannot walk over the president’s veto, because that would require a two-thirds majority in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Miettinen asks for a technical clarification here, and it is a useful one: once the veto holds, the opposition has little reason even to table its own bills, because they will not clear the final lock.
2. The budget surplus. In the weeks before the vote, what weighed on Argentine financial markets was a set of Peronist spending bills in parliament that could have eaten the surplus. After the result, LLA alone holds roughly a third of the seats in the Chamber, and together with the centre-right PRO around 40% — enough to stop them.
3. Juicio político. A strong Peronist showing would have opened the political-legal route by which a holder of high office can be removed, which at worst would have ended Milei’s term early. That too requires two-thirds in both chambers, and it is no longer available.
From these follows Tolvanen’s third conclusion: the pace picks up. The middle groupings — neither clearly LLA allies nor Peronists — now have a greater incentive to co-operate after a strong mandate, which makes labour-market and tax reform more likely.
Argentina’s debt is not large — the problem is credibility
The single most surprising claim in the episode is this: Argentina’s public debt is around 70–80% of GDP, and on Tolvanen’s account the Finnish state carries more debt relative to GDP than that.
A clarification on what the episode says. The precise outcome of the comparison depends on the measure used: the Finnish figure is general-government EDP debt, while the Argentine number varies with whether intra-public debt is counted. But the claim does not rest on a decimal, and Tolvanen says so himself: the quantity is not the problem — market access is.
The mechanism he describes runs like this:
- Argentina has repeatedly missed payments, defaulted and restructured — under the Kirchner administrations, under Mauricio Macri and under Alberto Fernández.
- As a result the Argentine state has no credible access to international private bond markets at sensible rates.
- Countries like Finland and Spain can refinance maturing tranches despite running deficits. Argentina cannot.
- On top of that comes the maturity profile: the Peronist administration left its successor a debt stack whose short end matures densely.
Miettinen gives this the rates framing: the yield curve is normally upward-sloping, so short money is cheaper, but if there is a great deal of it, rolling it is painful because refinancing keeps coming round. He notes this is not uniquely Argentine — Greece defaulted and is functioning again, and Finland too has had moments of wondering whether the nerve would hold when two billion came due.
That also explains why Milei’s administration has not chosen another restructuring: the strategy is precisely to break the default cycle and normalise the state’s financing position, which is slower but more durable.
The US swap line: election interference or liquidity?
Here the speakers are partly at odds, and the episode leaves the disagreement in.
Ahola concedes outright that it was election interference: “of course it was election interference, there’s no getting round it, and in principle that isn’t kosher.” But he offers two counterweights. Central-bank currency-swap lines are routine — they were used in the financial crisis and the covid crisis. And had the Peronists won, the financing would have come from the IMF instead, at no lower cost.
Tolvanen’s correction is technical and changes the character of the question: liquidity financing is not used to fund a deficit, because Milei’s budget is in surplus. It is a liquidity arrangement, not stimulus — and simultaneously a diplomatic success.
Miettinen adds a third angle: the arrangement was not a bad deal for the United States, and looked more like a bet that paid as the peso firmed.
The indicators: poverty and inflation
Ahola puts the sharpest question in the episode to the other side: if the poverty measure has fallen and inflation is low, does that not count as a measure even for people who treat share prices and sovereign yields as noise?
Tolvanen anchors the numbers: the debate is conducted on figures from INDEC, Argentina’s statistics office, and the most recent official poverty report covered the first half of the year. Both poverty and extreme poverty had fallen, with the poverty rate around 30%. For the second half there are nowcasts from Martín Rozada and colleagues pointing to continued decline.
Miettinen lists the other indicators moving the same way: GDP, the stabilisation of dollar-denominated sovereign debt, repair of the central bank’s balance sheet, falling public consumption and the dismantling of business subsidies. That last one is the one with a direct Finnish read-across: subsidies to firms and to the third sector are a mechanism for distributing public money selectively, and in Argentina individual bills had been used as targeted funding channels.
The Finnish comparison: an interest-rate strategy nobody modelled
The domestic edge of the episode concerns state debt management. Miettinen’s claim is that Finland moved by strategic decision from fixed to floating rates on the grounds that financial theory says floating is cheaper over the long run — and that the decision was then executed mechanically even when rates were at zero or negative.
His argument is not that the theory is wrong. It is that two things can be true at once: the yield curve is normally upward-sloping, and negative rates are historically rare. The second should have been modelled, because it is exactly what made locking in long rates unusually cheap.
The cost estimate — “a few billion, could be ten” — is an estimate in the episode, not a calculation, and the recollection that Matti Vanhanen acknowledged the strategy is likewise a recollection. Switzerland and Austria are mentioned as the counter-examples that lengthened their maturities instead.
Where the speakers disagree
The disagreements here are small but concrete, and worth keeping visible.
- On Milei’s degree. Ahola offers to bet that Milei is a doctor of economics. Tolvanen corrects him: two master’s degrees, no doctorate. Checked: Tolvanen is right — Milei’s qualifications are at master’s level. Ahola does not quibble, and his own addition is that credentials and competence do not always correlate.
- On the swap line. Ahola treats it as improper in principle but defensible; Tolvanen rejects the frame entirely and calls it a liquidity instrument. Neither moves to the other’s position.
- On strong leaders. Miettinen says he would favour a more dynamic system than Finland’s, but flags the gap in liberal thinking himself: the same structures that let Milei execute his programme are the ones that let Peronism take power — and on Trump he says it has gone too far. He also raises France as the case where a strong president above a weak parliament produces deadlock.
- On whether democracy works. Ahola’s prior was that the public would not tolerate the adjustment; the result said otherwise. He says so plainly rather than retrofitting his forecast.
Claims presented as claims
- The Finland-versus-Argentina debt comparison. An order-of-magnitude comparison whose outcome depends on the measure.
- The cost of the Finnish rate strategy. An estimate, not a calculation; the ministerial acknowledgement is a recollection.
- The profit to the United States on the swap. Offered without a source.
- The “thirty years of zero growth in Finland” trajectory. Miettinen’s scenario, not a forecast.
- The claim that every Finnish parliamentary party contains Peronists. A rhetorical sharpening, and marked as such in the episode.
What survives
Two things.
The first is the distinction between the quantity of debt and the refinanceability of debt. Finnish public debate rarely separates the two, largely because Finland has so far had no reason to.
The second is the parliamentary arithmetic. The result is read here not as a support percentage but through what it prevents: overriding a veto, adding spending, and removing a president. That is a way of reading election results that works well beyond Argentina.
How the episode runs
- 00:00 — “¡Que las fuerzas del cielo nos acompañen y viva la libertad carajo!”
- 00:20 — Javier Milei’s election win and the forecasts
- 01:47 — A spending-cuts comparison, a surprise among voters, and the US swap support
- 03:21 — Aleksi Tolvanen, Amos Ahola and Sami Miettinen sabre open champagne
- 03:58 — Media reactions, criticism of Peronism, and the need for historical context
- 06:21 — What La Libertad Avanza’s 40% means in parliament
- 08:05 — Veto power secured, spending increases halted, and the Senate’s role
- 09:42 — Juicio político rejected — the reform pace picks up
- 11:36 — US–Finland comparison: differences in presidential power
- 13:15 — Strong leaders, with a detour to France
- 15:02 — Libertarian leadership as a necessity — co-operation with the right
- 17:14 — Market reactions: the Merval down in September, up in October
- 19:03 — The indicators: poverty and inflation falling
- 21:11 — Balance-sheet repair, spending cuts and dismantling subsidies
- 23:06 — The INDEC poverty report and the downward trend
- 25:18 — Currency swaps as crisis tools — possible returns for the US
- 27:07 — Debt versus trust: the burden of a default history
- 29:36 — Liquidity arrangements and the budget surplus
- 31:28 — Comparisons with Finland’s crises, and breaking the default cycle
- 33:22 — The debt ratio does not tell the whole story — financing normalises
- 35:10 — The pace of adjustment and dismantling the Peronist legacy
- 37:04 — Mistakes in Finland’s interest-rate strategy and yield-curve moves
- 39:26 — Locking in long-term rates, and the effect of appointments
- 41:33 — The role of economists, Milei’s education and the Spanish-speaking field
- 43:27 — Outlook for the rest of the term: labour markets, taxation, the peso
- 45:46 — Closing thanks, and a move to currency and crypto in the Inner Circle