One day after Donald Trump celebrated a multibillion-dollar bailout for Argentina, his administration moved to double the ante.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters at the Treasury building Wednesday that the United States is “working on a $20 billion facility that would be adjacent” to the $20 billion credit swap line Trump already approved, totaling $40 billion in assistance for the economically fragile South American country.
“Many banks are interested in it, and many sovereign funds,” Bessent said. “It is a private-sector solution to Argentina’s upcoming debt payments.”
The aid is intended to salvage Argentina’s collapsing economy ahead of the country’s October 26 midterm elections. That vote will determine if Argentine President Javier Milei, one of Trump’s international allies, will maintain the ability to pursue his dramatic cost-cutting agenda.
But there’s another notable beneficiary of the Trump admin’s Argentina bailout package: major hedge funds led by Bessent’s friends. Several major investment funds, including BlackRock, Fidelity, and Pimco, stand to significantly gain from the aid transfer, as do several independent investors with ties to Bessent, The New York Times reported earlier this month.
Bessent described the exchange Wednesday as an “economic Monroe Doctrine,” referring to the 1823 policy that rejected European intervention and colonialism in the Western hemisphere.
“Much better to use the heft of the U.S. economic power rather than have to use military power,” Bessent continued, comparing the situation to the supposed “narco traffic coming out of Venezuela.”
But the White House’s planned Argentina bailout is remarkably hypocritical for an administration that has axed critical executive agencies under the auspice of slashing spending.
Stateside, the government is still shut down over how to fund Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget, which included cuts of billions from Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid—a shutdown that Bessent himself claimed Wednesday was costing America “$15 billion a day.”
And the U.S. will likely need a bailout of its own very soon. American soybean farmers have been pummeled by Trump’s tariff policies, which have ripped the Chinese market from their grasp. However, after it came to light that Argentina had replaced the U.S. as China’s top soybean supplier, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that the anticipated Argentina-bound cash infusion had morphed into a “credit swap line.”
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