TS Lombard: "Musk’s short-term-pain/long-term-gain thesis owes a lot to his chainsaw-wielding hero Javier Milei. Argentina introduced stinging austerity measures after Milei's election victory in December 2023, basically by freezing govt spending while inflation was running in triple digits. After a brief recession, the economy has already started to recover – much faster than anyone expected. Inflation is coming down, and Argentina has swapped twin deficits for twin surpluses. Milei's chainsaw worked! But copying the policies of a country that had massive endemic corruption and was on the brink of hyperinflation is, er, problematic. The public readily accepted Milei’s nasty medicine (they explicitly voted for it) and any chance of an economic revival had to start by crushing inflation. Confidence couldn’t return when inflation was running at 200+%. The US is in a very different situation. Yes, inflation is a bit high, but not so high that Musk and co should deliberately engineer a recession."