Ian Bremmer: Bukele's Bitcoin Gamble in El Salvador | Quick Take | GZERO Media

How will Bukele's Bitcoin experiment play out at home and what does it mean for the US dollar?

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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:

Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here, kicking off your week with a Quick Take. Hope everyone's doing well. I thought I would talk about El Salvador, a surprising amount of news coming out of this comparatively small country.

First of all, you've got a president who's been in power now for about a year, Nayib Bukele, he's all of 39 years old and 90% approval ratings, pretty consistent over the last year. And in part, that's because there's been massive violence and huge economic problems and extraordinary corruption in the country. And this is a guy who was a former advertising executive, he was a local mayor, and ran with a lot of charisma, with of course, an enormous amount of social media savvy. In fact, if you follow him on social media, he kind of styles himself the Elon Musk of the Northern Triangle, which is not really a great thing I grant you. The Northern Triangle is like El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. And I mean, I guess if there is one such person that has to be Elon Musk, he's the guy.

But the point is he's really into showing himself as being hip, and technology savvy, and in the moment, and not in anybody's pocket, and I can do whatever I want. And indeed, he has been doing pretty much anything he wants. He said he was going to jail people in El Salvador, in his country, that broke the lockdown. The court said you didn't have the right to do it. He did it anyway. And he occupied parliament with military forces. He's removed his top judges, ignoring the legal process that needs to occur to make that happen. I mean, it feels like there are literally no checks and balances legally on Bukele in El Salvador right now. It's kind of like a Hungary Victor Orban type situation, except when there's no real opposition and the entire population is in favor. And by the way, no European Union either.

Now, there is the equivalent of a check and balance on Bukele and that's not a formal international structure, but rather the fact that his economy is really dependent on the United States. They use the US dollar as currency, and they need support from the IMF because their economy continues to deteriorate. He's handled coronavirus relatively well in terms of spread of cases and whatnot, I mean, almost in a Chinese type way, but that hasn't helped them in terms of getting hit with this massive global recession, the way everybody else has. And if you want support from the IMF, he would need to be much more transparent in the way he governs, which he's not prepared to do. In fact, just this weekend, he arrested yet another high-level opposition member on very dubious corruption claims. And at the same time, disbanded an OAS, Organization American States, unit that was meant to engage in anti-corruption oversight in El Salvador, supported by the United States, said, "I'm not doing that."

Read the full transcript: https://www.gzeromedia.com/quick-take/bukeles-bitcoin-gamble-in-el-salvador

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