US pledges $2B for UN humanitarian aid as Trump slashes funding and warns agencies to 'adapt or die'

[Igel]

6. Nobody actually knows what the "swap" consisted of.

$20B was private funding but the scant reports afterwards say that the banks backed away and may have gone for a much smaller loan. And that's where that stands, apart from speculation and political rhetoric as to how it's good or bad. Notice there's no claim (at least that I've seen) that they did go for a smaller loan given the lack of evidence that would support such a claim. That lack of evidence extends to any claim that they did, in fact, go through with the larger $20B deal. That may is really important here, pointing to the 'lack of evidence' bit.

Transparent the process was not.

The Exchange Stabilization Fund $20B was at least partly a peso purchase (although how many billions of dollars of pesos were bought is unstated, with estimates being around $2B ... But those are estimates in the absence of a lot of actual, you know, information and maybe it was the $20B that many assume given the lack of evidence). But it was also, given what was originally said about it, just 'made available' to guarantee that AR had access to $. How much of it's been used ... Again ... Congress has asked for the info and gotten pretty much no information and so all that's left is speculation and political rhetoric. That's fine, as long as the speaker knows the difference between those and fact (and doesn't try to convince the listener that the speculation is fact).

I, for one, would like to actually know what the current status of the ESF monies are, esp. if "we've" bought a crapload of pesos even as Milei is trying to devalue what most say is an overvalued peso. (Then again, already a year ago a lot of economists were saying that the $ was overvalued, I've seen how they made that kind of judgment but I don't know that the 'how' really explains the 'what'--if it's a valid measure of 'under', 'over' or 'right' valuation.)

As for the private deal, unless there's some sort of government guarantee that they'll not lose money (or, even worse, are guaranteed a profit), meh--they takes their risks, they gets their consequences.