Luis Caputo: Milei’s financial wizard is losing credibility

Luis “Toto” Caputo, 60, has an unmatched ability to raise money in turbulent waters. The Argentine economy minister eliminated the export tax on grains earlier last week, and in just three days, $7 billion flowed into the country. Last Wednesday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the White House is negotiating a $20 billion aid package for Argentina. The financial storm that threatened to wipe out the peso and Argentine bonds subsided. The national currency appreciated again, and bonds regained ground. This former Wall Street trader, who has never shied away from taking risky financial moves, earned another pat on the back from President Javier Milei — and a torrent of criticism.

Caputo was born into a wealthy family with extensive political and power connections. His grandfather Nicolás founded a construction company that has become one of the largest in the country, Caputo S.A., and his uncle Dante served as foreign minister under Raúl Alfonsín following Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983. He studied at the private Cardenal Newman school — the same school attended by former president Mauricio Macri and his cousin Nicolás Caputo — and is the uncle of Santiago Caputo, whom Milei described as “the true architect” of the electoral victory that brought him to the presidency in 2023.

He is an economist from the University of Buenos Aires, but his peers and former Cabinet colleagues describe him as a trader. “If I want someone to manage my personal finances, I’d trust Toto Caputo completely because his deep market knowledge will make me money. But as economy minister, I prefer someone who lays out the rules of the game and intervenes as little as possible,” says Joaquín Cottani, who served as Caputo’s Secretary of Economic Policy until June 2024.

“He’s a great trader and a terrible public official,” says one Argentine stockbroker. “That’s the general opinion in the field,” he adds, after Caputo reintroduced currency purchase controls this past Friday. “What Macri valued in him was his understanding of how markets operate. He has a knack for anticipating movements, knowing how people think and react in this irrational world, and knowing how to show them the carrot, to pull a rabbit out of the hat,” agrees a former senior official from Macri’s government.

His reputation in the financial world dates back to the 1990s, when he worked for JPMorgan in the United States as a trader of bonds and equities in Argentina and Latin America. “Toto was a synthesis of the old and new schools: he liked the thrill of risk, but tried to scratch it with as much precision as possible,” Hernan Iglesias Illa wrote about him in Golden Boys, a book about the group of Argentines who worked on Wall Street at that time. Caputo moved from New York to London to take over as head of Trading for Eastern Europe and Latin America at Deutsche Bank, which he later chaired in Argentina between 2003 and 2008.

Sources close to Caputo say he hesitated when Macri invited him to join his Cabinet at the end of 2015 as Secretary of Finance. Married to Ximena Ruiz Hanglin and father of six children, Caputo was thriving in private banking and had his life well settled. His college friend, Mario Quintana, helped persuade him.

The then-secretary quickly earned the president’s appreciation thanks to the deal he reached with the “vulture funds” that had taken Argentina to court in 2010, blocking the South American country’s access to financial markets. From that moment, international private credit began to flow freely, and Caputo was promoted to Minister of Finance in early 2017. Argentina had returned to the world stage, and the then-chief of staff, Marcos Peña, dubbed him “the Messi of finance.”

The government’s trust in him remained intact when his name appeared in the Paradise Papers in connection with investments in tax havens. The document leak, published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), linked Caputo to two companies that did not appear in his public asset declaration as a public official. The minister said he omitted the information because he was not a shareholder in those companies and continued in office.

Caputo also ignored those who urged him to repatriate his wealth. “When you’re a minister and go abroad seeking investments, it’s embarrassing to have your money outside the country,” said economist and diplomat Guillermo Nielsen at the time. Seven years later, nothing has changed: two-thirds of his assets remain abroad. According to his latest asset declaration, Caputo’s wealth increased by 137% in 2024, reaching 11.851 billion pesos (equivalent to $11.1 million at the end of that year).

Among the most memorable milestones of his tenure under Macri was the 100-year bond he issued for $2.7 billion, but also his maneuvers from 2018 onward, when fresh funds began to dwindle. That May, he managed to sell $3 billion in peso-denominated Treasury bonds to Templeton and BlackRock funds to demonstrate that the government still had access to financial markets. He then proposed that Macri request a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, which became the largest in the institution’s history ($57 billion).

The use of the IMF funds sparked intense debates between the international organization’s staff and Caputo in his new role as head of the Central Bank of Argentina (BCRA), as recalled by Alejandro Werner, then director of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department, in his book La Argentina en el Fondo. “Appointing Caputo was another major mistake by Macri,” wrote Werner. “He was a person without experience in monetary policy, a key issue for achieving stabilization amid that tremendous crisis.”

In a later interview with EL PAÍS, Werner reiterated that at the time, “Argentina needed a central banker who would establish order and set the rules of the game so the market could function efficiently.” In his view, Caputo had “experience as a player, not as a referee,” and instead of setting clear rules, he preferred to intervene in the foreign exchange market.

In 2018, Milei had not yet entered politics and was an eccentric economist moving from one TV set to another, offering controversial opinions that boosted ratings. In one televised appearance, he called Caputo “inefficient” and accused him of “burning through $15 billion in reserves irresponsibly.” Caputo lasted only three months at the BCRA and resigned for “personal reasons.”

“The best minister in history”

Milei changed his mind after meeting Caputo in person. The president-elect invited him to accompany him on a trip to the United States in November 2023, and upon their return, confirmed him as his economy minister. He has lavished Caputo with dozens of praises, even calling him “the best economy minister in Argentina’s history.”

Caputo returned, ready to prove himself. Milei gave him another chance, and Caputo has had no trouble adapting to his new boss’s style. “I’m impressed by his public transformation,” says a former senior Macri official. “The person I dealt with back then didn’t have this euphoria or arrogance; he would never say things like ‘Buy, champ,’” he notes, referring to the phrase Caputo used weeks ago to dispel rumors of an impending peso devaluation.

He is also surprised that Caputo shares the Cabinet with the Minister of Deregulation, Federico Sturzenegger: “They hated each other back in the Macri era. For Sturze, who studied at Harvard and is active in academia, Toto was a hustler, a schemer; for Toto, Sturze was the typical academic living in an abstract world far from reality.”

Cottani believes that as economy minister, Caputo is more like Pablo Aimar, the former River Plate and Valencia soccer player, than Messi. “Aimar was great at dribbling and surprising defenders, but he struggled to finish at goal,” he says. For Cottani, Caputo “is very skilled at pulling rabbits out of a hat, like the measure to eliminate export taxes that lasted three days, or the tax amnesty that prevented reserves from falling.” That skill, he continues, “would be very useful for handling external shocks, but not as a solution to Argentina’s fundamental problems and economic imbalances.”

A week ago, Argentina’s economy seemed to be plunging into the abyss, but Caputo once again pulled rabbits out of thin air. No one knows if he has more left — or when he will use them.

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