What Milei said about investment and the RIGI

That is why the RIGI is already receiving approval requests for over 210 billion dollars, with steel factories, a urea factory, and an automobile factory among its adherents.

For the first time, in addition to having energy, food, critical minerals, and talent, there is a State that wants these sectors to develop and enhance each other.

And just as those who invent must be able to protect what they created, we are moving towards the approval of the Republic of Argentina's adhesion to the Patent Cooperation Treaty. This will culminate a pending process since 1998. All of this is done to turn Argentina into a truly productive country, and a productive country is built with two protagonists that need each other: the entrepreneur and the worker. Without daring entrepreneurs, there is no work to offer, and without workers, not even the best idea can scale.

Today, just over two years since its enactment, the RIGI has 29 projects approved for nearly 80 billion dollars in investment and another 130 billion waiting for approval.

Among the approximate projects, there are 13 mining projects totaling nearly 28 billion dollars, of which we find five in this province that generate over 19,000 jobs.

The RIGI is synonymous with fiscal stability, customs stability, exchange stability, and legal security for those who risk their capital, and that quickly translates into investments and jobs for the Argentine economy.

Not only that, but almost all of these projects generate exports, improving the external front of the country. This means that, thanks to their work, Argentina as a whole gets richer every day, allowing all Argentines access to a better quality of life.

That is why it is hard for me to understand the opposition who talk about the fiscal cost of the RIGI. How can an investment that would never have happened without the RIGI cost something?

That is why this is true federalism and true inclusion, that the children of the provinces stay in the provinces with quality jobs in the private sector and well paid. That is why I would also like to recognize the governors who understood and embraced the change of era by adhering to the RIGI and going out to seek investments.

The numbers we see today in investments support their decision. Between Catamarca and San Juan, there are already 10 approved projects totaling approximately 23 billion dollars.

This means that, once the international context calms down and next year the Argentines validate this course in Argentina, without a doubt Argentina is on its way to becoming investment grade and will begin to experience a growth process never seen before in Argentine history. But the most important thing is not the numbers themselves, but what they allowed. With zero deficit, the state stopped competing with the private sector for credit.

Those sectors that were previously protected and do have collateral are not investing; they pull back and instead, those that have to emerge must also accumulate, do not have sufficient collateral and that is why they do not expand as strongly. If you additionally add to that the credit disaster that Argentina has faced, where today the credit in Argentina is... this is very funny because you can sometimes hear from Argentine news for example that people are in debt.

And that is what is causing investments to seem somewhat lagged, but in parallel we created the RIGI. In the RIGI, we already have 210 billion dollars. It is the most important sectoral development policy in Argentine history where a third is already approved and ready to go. Therefore, what we see is that moving forward, you today have two tax structures: that of the RIGI and the tax structure of the old system.

Because for there to be investment, it is not enough to have talent, and it is also not enough to have natural resources. Argentina had both for 100 years, and yet it impoverished. For there to be investment, it is necessary to create conditions that make someone willing to risk their capital in the country, and that is a titanic task when dealing with a country that has defrauded its investors countless times with defaults, currency controls, expropriations, and contracts that were broken overnight.

Why? Because we are achieving this from the real side, from the energy surplus. In fact, this year Argentina will end with a trade surplus of around 30 billion dollars, and this is important in light of what is to come next year. We have already secured over 20 billion dollars since the election; if you want to consider what has occurred this year, it is over 16 billion dollars. But not only that: we have the Chinese swap, we have the swap with the United States, we have a clean futures position of 15 billion dollars, which represents 50% of the monetary base, and we have what will be the trade balance for next year and what will come in from RIGI.

Just with these figures, we can already affirm that this is the most important industrial and development policy in Argentine history, and I have no doubt that the number of projects under this regime will continue to increase. And here I want to make a clarification for some economists who complain about the supposed fiscal cost of RIGI: I would like them to explain one thing, how can an investment that would have never happened without RIGI have a fiscal cost?

000 billion dollars, this is called enormous economies of scale, and the counterpart of that is tremendous investments. So we have to be quite careful because a lot of capital means very low interest rates, while we have a very high Country Risk, and this transition must be managed wisely, but we have sectors that are indeed very, very dynamic and are pushing growth at this moment, such as, for example, the oil sector, the gas sector, the mining sector, and our agriculture, and we add to this what we are achieving in the knowledge economy and the opening we are doing to make Argentina a hub for artificial intelligence because Argentina is very suited to have data centers in vast, inhospitable, cold lands.

And the incentives regime for medium investments will catalyze a torrent of capital goods and irrigation systems. We cannot accept that our yields in Chaco are 600 kilos of cotton per hectare when in Brazil they are 1,400. Nor can we allow Brazil to triple its soybean production using seeds with Argentine technology, made by Argentine companies, that cannot be sold in Argentina.

For that, we will continue to reduce the overall tax burden, whether through the elimination of the inflation tax or by reducing direct taxes that we are undertaking alongside the fiscal surplus.

Finally, the normalization of the foreign exchange market that we are announcing today makes foreign direct investment possible again, since one only invests when they know they will be able to access the fruits of their investment as they wish; this will be a new engine of growth. That is, during the last 15 years, policy has put a chokehold on investment and opened the faucet of public spending and monetary issuance. We did the opposite, we have put a chokehold on the State, a chokehold on issuance, and we have freed the faucet of private initiative so that investments can finally come to Argentina.

In turn, it will imply less future fiscal pressure on taxpayers, which will mean greater incentive to invest. In a globalized economy, and even more since the existence of the Internet, capital has become nomadic. Today, anyone can open an account in the United States or Paraguay without leaving their home, and they do it seeking better fiscal conditions than those we offer. That is why it is imperative for Argentina to once again be attractive to Argentines.