The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Government of Javier Milei closed an agreement this Wednesday within the framework of the second review of the current extended facilities program. Argentina will receive a new resource contribution, this time of about 1 billion dollars. With this disbursement, the South American country will have received about 15 billion of the 20 billion agreed upon in April last year. Argentina is the largest debtor of the IMF and its obligations with the multilateral have increased by 36% in the last twelve months: in total, its debt exceeds 57 billion dollars.
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The new IMF disbursement — which still must be approved by its board — was justified by the organization with various praises for the Milei Government. It first highlighted that “the reformist momentum has significantly strengthened in recent months,” with the approval in Congress of a budget law for 2026 and “crucial legislation aimed at formalizing the holding of financial assets by residents, improving labor market flexibility, ratifying key trade agreements, and unlocking investments in mining.”
The statement released by the International Monetary Fund also noted that “improvements in the monetary and exchange rate framework are generating an increase in reserves, with Central Bank currency purchases exceeding 5.5 billion dollars so far this year.” And it considered the “zero cash” fiscal policy, based on a deep adjustment of public spending, as key. According to the multilateral’s estimates, the Argentine economy will grow 1.4% this year.
From Washington, where he led the negotiations for the Argentine side, Milei’s Economy Minister, Luis Caputo, celebrated the consensus reached. “This agreement is a very important step in consolidating the macroeconomic stability we have worked on these two years and will contribute to strengthening the economic growth of our country,” he said on his social networks.
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Without access to international debt markets, Argentina needs resources to cancel its huge external commitments, including those it maintains with the IMF itself. After signing the current program, in April 2025, the country canceled maturities with the Fund for more than 3 billion dollars, corresponding to principal and interest of the 44.5 billion loan agreed in 2018, the largest in the multilateral’s history. This year, Argentina faces maturities with the IMF for 3.6 billion.
The agreement and the approval of the second review come one day after official statistics revealed a “bad” figure for the Government, in Milei’s own words. Inflation climbed to 3.4% in March and has been rising continuously for 10 months, casting doubt on what until now was considered the ultra Administration’s greatest achievement. Price increases, along with rising unemployment, the increase in labor informality (already reaching 43%), the fall in consumption and the purchasing power of wages paint a critical scenario for the Executive: surveys agree on the observation of growing social unrest with the direction of the economy and a marked loss of support for the president.
Milei has partly acknowledged the problems and has asked Argentines for “patience.” But, at the same time, he has insisted that he will not change his economic plan at all. “The chainsaw does not stop,” he said this Tuesday, at the annual meeting of the Chamber of American companies in Argentina (AmCham). “We will continue cutting public spending to keep lowering taxes because taxes are a robbery […] We will take all the pesos off the street until the inflation rate collapses […] We will not give an inch on monetary policy, we will not give an inch on continuing deregulation,” he reiterated. “We will tie ourselves to the ship’s mast, we will not listen to the siren songs.”
