A brief recap of your enriching comments:

  What a stupid thing to say. Have you ever read about the currency crisis?
  This is from a Wikipedia article you could have found in 30 seconds [...]
  I don't give a fuck about Argentina for the purposes of this conversation [...] 
  [...] follow more closely the points being made before following any compulsion to chime in.

Maybe you should spend more than 30 seconds on a topic (and give a fuck about it) before giving in to your compulsion to chime in. In particular if you feel like being arrogant and isulting at the same time, calling others' ideas "stupid". Well done...

Edit: For the record, you have conceded in the points of substance, particularly considering the minutiae you are addressing and all that you are surprisingly leaving out. You stated earlier:

    I know what did happen --default, followed by an IMF-imposed austerity program, led to 50% poverty.

And yet poverty went down right after default and devaluation ("currency crisis"), as shown clearly in the two plots given above. Do you get that? If the rate in question (i.e., poverty) goes down after your chosen event (i.e., default), it's plain nonsense to claim said event pushes the rate up! Talk about the complexity of the "mixed yield" of simultaneous default and devaluation if you will, but just don't bring up stats because they will destroy your point, counselor.

This is what you have been in this thread: an arrogant, cocky lawyer who gets his most vital piece of evidence hilariously backwards.

Have you ever read about the Argentine crisis, or is your knowledge limited to Wolfram Alpha's graphs and Googleable factoids?

The fact is that this was a thread about how Argentina's crisis provides evidence supporting the positive benefits of allowing economic collapse. The initial post was intensely stupid in that it reduced the complex effects of economic collapse to a simple if-this-then-that causation. The only relevant point is causation, which I argued was not the case, and which you conceded -- despite you neither having made the original point, nor any attempt whatsoever to defend it.

You don't seem to be arguing the initial point, or the counter point. You only want to talk about Argentina, without taking a moment to understand the context in which it was mentioned. So congratulations on nailing me for reversing the order of the austerity program and the default -- great job, I feel really dumb for failing to correctly order a sequence of events related to a tangential point.

Here's what you have been:

Two guys are arguing on the street, and during that argument one of the guys mentions the name of a sports team. A drunk, walking by, happens to be a fan of that team. Despite not knowing in what context that team was mentioned, or whether it was mentioned positively or negatively, the drunk gets in a fight with one of the men. And not necessarily the one who uttered the team's name.

You're the drunk.

It's a shame we need to get to depth 10 to get some substantial discussion. I meant no offense and basically have been trying to tell you (among other things) that your use of "stupid" is just asking people to chime in!

I was born and raised in Argentina, though this should not matter, nor does it need to be "disclosed". I knew what the WolframAlpha plots would look like because I have lived the situation. Look, Argentina has been an exceptional country for many reasons (mostly bad), and it's not a too-big-to-fail state such as the US or Italy, so clearly its experiences need not apply to other countries.

In that respect, I do not agree with crag's suggestion that anything applicable to Argentina in 2002 could be applied to the rest of the lot in 2011. The thing is, though, that instead of raising your valid points about simplistic causation, etc., you mistakenly pointed (and in a snarky way) to Argentina's "currency crisis", i.e., devaluation, then to default, in turn linking them to social distress. Please convince yourself: in Argentina things got way better after default, devaluation and big spending, which took place at the same time. Argentina's real currency collapse can be found here [1] (with relatively little unemployment and poverty, by the way). There was no IMF-imposed austerity after the default: most of that austerity was recommended in order to meet debt obligations up to 2002, and leaving that cycle was the whole point of the default! Even though Kirchner was smart enough to pay the IMF debt, following the steps of Russia and Brazil, just to get them off his back, there was no state austerity after the default.

As for my first link, I thought (mistakenly) you implied that Argentina had gotten worse since the default, and I provided a recent article with a snappy reply. Not very constructive, I admit and concede.

Beer in hand, I salute you!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Argentina

(Yes, sorry, I'm loving this.) As Katie Couric said, "not to belabor the point", I feel you are still not seeing when crucial point of this however tangential thread. You say

So congratulations on nailing me for reversing the order of the austerity program and the default -- great job, I feel really dumb for failing to correctly order a sequence of events related to a tangential point.

Well, it's not a minor point to this thread, though this thread sure is, I agree, completely inconsequential in absolute terms: reversing the order means that the culprit could be the austerity measures, not the fuck-the-system default, which happened right before the first derivative changed signs!

Let me repeat that you have referred almost interchangeably to default, devaluation and an austerity program, which is really confusing. The first two are easily marked on a timeline: December 2001 and January 2002. By now I don't know what austerity measures you refer to, but again all this would take you very far from your statements linking default and/or devaluation and poverty. So, however tangential this thread is, it is based on the core of your original statements. Currency crisis and/or default did not, in any conceivable way, lead to the inception of cardboard collectors, nor to the 50% poverty rate. These issues had been building up steadily for a decade by the time the default happened, and this is not an interpretation or factoid.

As an aside (not countering any point!) be aware that for countries like Argentina big-government initiatives and fuck-the-system approaches go almost hand in hand, because comply-with-the-system plans means that you have to put aside a lot of your GDP to pay outrageous debt interests (forget about capital), leaving you little money to spread. I mean, look at the US debt ceiling fight the world witnessed last August. With a fraction of that spectacle any Third World country would have been left paying >30% annual rates, while the US is not (yet?) susceptible to speculation and still pays its cozy 3%. Fair or not, don't expect countries to behave the same "serious" measures under such a varied array of conditions. [No references for all this data. Feel free to grill me with factoids.]

As a final note, a few comments on:

Have you ever read about the Argentine crisis, or is your knowledge limited to Wolfram Alpha's graphs and Googleable factoids?

Have you? Should it ever matter in a debate? I'm presenting facts based on Wolfram Alpha, and you on Wikipedia. Why should we consider them factoids and not facts? Because we don't dig all the way for primary sources? We are both supporting our points with factoids, then. So? Should we support them with "reason alone"? Incidentally and ironically, you seem to have never read about Argentinean economics in depth: nobody with the lightest acquaintance of contemporary Argentinean economics could have honestly been unaware that poverty was, for almost a decade, sharply on the rise up to the default, and make the basic mistake of saying "look! default led to poverty". But boy, do you have a hard time accusing others!