Argentina’s president Javier Milei promised to juice his nation’s economy through anarcho-capitalist policies, and he’s finally engaged in the most anarcho-capitalist thing of all: endorsing a cryptocurrency without researching it only to have the bottom fall out on it almost immediately, allowing insiders to cash out while retail backers hold the bag. Now, according to Reuters, Milei’s opposition is threatening impeachment over the scheme. Oops!
Here’s what happened: Late Friday night, Milei fired off a tweet lending his support to a cryptocurrency token called $LIBRA. Milei described the coin to his nearly four million followers as a “private project dedicated to encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy,” claiming that it would be “funding small Argentine businesses and ventures.”
In under one hour from Milei’s tweet, $LIBRA skyrocketed by 2,000%, per CoinDesk, and reached a market capitalization of nearly $4.5 billion. And then the bottom fell out. As the coin reached its peak trading volume, insiders started to sell off, cashing out the coins that they held before Milei served as their useful idiot. An analysis from BubbleMaps warned that 82% of the token was held by a single cluster, suggesting that the creators and whoever else they looped in on the project were just waiting to get enough dupes on board to jump ship.
And jump ship they did. As Milei’s followers poured in, the insiders got out. In about five hours, nearly $4.5 billion of market cap was wiped out. Financial analysis site The Kobeissi Letter described it as “one of the fastest and largest destructions of wealth in retail trading history.”
Around the same time the collapse was happening, Milei was trying to distance himself from the whole thing. He deleted the original tweet about five hours after posting it, per the New York Times—which would have been right around when the coin value was imploding. He followed that up with another tweet making clear that he had no idea what he was throwing his support behind in the first place.
“A few hours ago I published a tweet, like so many other countless times, supporting a supposed private venture to which I obviously have no connection,” he wrote. “I was not familiar with the details of the project and after having internalized myself I decided not to continue disseminating it (that is why I deleted the tweet).”
He concluded the post by stating, “To the filthy rats of the political caste who want to take advantage of this situation to do harm, I want to say that every day they confirm how lowly politicians are, and increase our conviction to kick their asses out.” Which uh…what are you in this scenario, my guy? You are quite literally the elected official who, without any due diligence, encouraged people to pour their money into a project that was seemingly designed to rug pull. The website for the project was literally created the day of launch. It’s not like this required significant research to determine it was shady.
Milei’s opposition at least seems to believe he holds more responsibility than he’s willing to take on, and is apparently weighing an attempt to impeach the president. “This scandal, which embarrasses us on an international scale, requires us to launch an impeachment request against the president,” opposition lawmaker Leandro Santoro said, per Reuters.
Milei has not exactly endured himself to Argentinians since taking office in 2023. Elected as an outsider promising to get the nation back on track through extreme measures was it faced staggering inflation, his policies have plunged more than half the population into poverty. Earlier this month, he was the subject of mass protests over his ongoing railing against “wokeism.” Sounds familiar, yeah? Might as well chalk the crypto collapse up to just one more page out of the Donald Trump playbook that Milei is pulling from.
