Argentine GDP fell by 4.3% in June from the same time last year - sharpest decline since 2002 crisis

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2. Macri's campaign promises are like his marriage vows: made to be broken (and quickly).

Every one of these policies contradict Macri's campaign rhetoric from last year - and in fact corroborate Scioli's warnings (which Macri referred to as a "campaign of fear&quot . The middle class was very cleverly led to believe that "only the lazy indians and illegals" would feel a pinch under his "reforms."

No wonder Trump is so fond of Macri; even the Donald has to be impressed with a flim-flam this shameless.

As for the INDEC, it was always my belief that Néstor Kirchner made his single worst mistake when he began interfering with it in 2007 - because once he did so it became a political football (which Macri is now using for his own ends, albeit to no effect).

It started out as the silliest dispute, really. Health insurers had announced a substantial increase (25%, if I recall) in premiums for '07; but the Health Ministry, which has to sign off on all premium hikes, only approved about half that much. INDEC, however, had already prepared - though not quite published - their January CPI estimate (which included the 25% insurance rate hike); but because the hike ended up being about half that much, Kirchner insisted their estimate be revised accordingly - from 1.5% to 1.1%. The Chief Consumer Price Analyst, Graciela Bevacqua, resigned in protest.

Kirchner did this to hold down interest payments on CPI-linked government bonds; a 7-point underestimate in inflation saved the Central Bank up to $3 billion a year in inflation-indexed interest payments. Needless to say, the opposition used the controversy to discredit all INDEC data, even when the IMF - no friend of Argentina - refused to do so (they correctly used the Economy Ministry's implicit GDP prices in lieu of the CPI figure).

This brings us to Macri, who simply used the dispute as an excuse to force INDEC to stop publishing any data for as long as he could (knowing the data would show that he was pushing the country into a deep recession); even the IMF called him out on it. Bevacqua, for her part, was brought back to INDEC when Macri took office - but then resigned in protest (again) when she saw that Macri had no intention of giving the agency its independence back.

Anyone could have told her that.