The Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, harshly confronted the media operator Eduardo Van der Kooy following a column published in Clarín titled “The Alarms Have Been Triggered”, in which an attempt was made to establish a scenario of supposed economic and political fragility for the government of Javier Milei.
Rather than letting the operation slide, Caputo responded from his X (formerly Twitter) account with a message full of irony, in which he completely turned around the thesis of the article and exposed the openly defeatist tone of the morning newspaper's column.
The post from the Minister of Economy on X
“You’re right, Van der Kooy, I didn’t make a prediction,” the minister began, in a sarcastic post that quickly went viral. From there, he listed a series of supposed “errors” of his own that, in reality, serve as a direct refutation of the Clarín text.
In that sense, he joked that “the dollar just went to 4,000,” that “inflation didn’t drop below 20 percent monthly, nor 12, nor 8, nor 4,” and that “there was no investment in energy.” He also mocked the idea that the administration failed to rebuild reserves or address macroeconomic imbalances, pointing out that it was “impossible to fix things with the Fund” and “even less to buy dollars and accumulate reserves in a band scheme.”
The minister's response targeted the central point of Van der Kooy's article, which presents Caputo as "a public official disconnected from reality" and claims that Milei's administration would be entering a phase of wear and tear. In response, the minister chose a simple rebuttal: to take each of the axes of the alarmist discourse and expose the contrast with reality through irony.
Caputo concluded that “in the end, all we did was reduce the fiscal deficit by 5 points in a month,” and then added another biting remark: “We must acknowledge that on important issues, you were right about everything and that if there was a prophet here, it was you.”
Eduardo Van der Kooy
In this way, the minister not only rejected the content of the column but also sought to highlight an increasingly repeated mechanism of the enveloped journalism: the attempt to create a crisis atmosphere even in the face of data and political definitions that go in the opposite direction.
