For most of the last decade, Argentina was the poster child of the US and the International Monetary Fund for liberal economic policies.
Now both the US and the IMF appear to have washed their hands of their once-prized pupil. Their policies toward developing nations in crisis since the 1994 Mexican peso collapse were factors in Argentina's current demise, along with the government's failure to control spending and appreciation against other major currencies of the US dollar, to which the Argentine peso is pegged at a one-to-one rate.
US President George W. Bush called the presidents of Mexico, Chile, and Uruguay this week to ask about Argentina.
His administration's decision to leave Argentina to its own devices was part of an ideological point: no bailouts for countries that don't put their accounts in order.
Yet the US strategy of all stick and no carrot may soon prove to have been extremely shortsighted.
The de la Rua government fell two days after the IMF announced that Argentina's monetary and fiscal policies, many of them supported by the IMF, were not sustainable.
Protesters last night were angry that Rodriguez Saa had appointed Carlos Grosso as a top presidential adviser even though Grosso has been dogged by allegations of corruption from when he was mayor of Buenos Aires in the 1990s.
The protesters were also angry that the country's Supreme Court rejected lower court rulings against limits on bank account withdrawals of US$250 per week.
Some 60 percent of Argentina's workforce is in the cash-based informal economy, economists say.
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