In addition to making payments to bondholders, Milei’s radical libertarian administration had “quickly and fully repaid its limited draw,” Bessent said, without specifying the amount.

The Treasury’s latest report on the status of the credit line said that Argentina’s central bank had traded pesos for $2.5 billion through the swap as of the end of October.

The Argentine Central Bank confirmed Bessent’s announcement.

The contentious and largely unprecedented U.S. rescue provided dollar liquidity to the Trump administration’s cash-strapped ideological ally and halted a market rout in Argentina ahead of crucial midterm elections last October.

Milei’s libertarian party won a major victory in the vote, cementing support for his harsh austerity program and quelling investor concerns about the crisis-stricken country’s ability to repay debts. In another sign of the revived optimism around Milei’s reforms, his government issued a dollar bond for the first time in eight years last month, presaging a return to international bond markets.

Thanks to Argentina’s deposit, Bessent said, the U.S. Exchange Stabilization Fund tapped for the bailout holds no more Argentine pesos.

He praised the payment as a landmark that justified the Treasury’s bailout of Argentina, which raised doubts about the consistency of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy and drew backlash in the U.S. for putting taxpayer funds at risk. Experts have also criticized the opaque and apparently unconditional nature of the loan.

“Stabilizing a strong American ally – and making tens of millions in profit for Americans – is an America First homerun deal,” Bessent wrote. “Setting the course for Latin America, a strong and stable Argentina that helps anchor a prosperous Western Hemisphere is in our clear best interest.”

Luis Caputo, Argentina’s economy minister thanked the Trump administration “for the trust in our economic policy.”

“It is an excellent reality for our country to have been able to build this geopolitical alliance and to know that we have the explicit support of the most important country in the world,” he said.

But Argentina is not out of the woods.

Its foreign exchange reserves still run perilously low. The country is set to come under further strain in the coming months from repayments on previous International Monetary Fund loans and other private debt.

Despite outliers like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a new analysis based on 19 studies involving 34,000 high achievers across multiple disciplines — including Nobel laureates, top chess players, Olympic champions, and elite musicians — found that individuals who achieved peak performance early in life were not always the same people to reach high success in adulthood. 

“Across the highest adult performance levels, peak performance is negatively correlated with early performance,” the report, which was published in the journal Science, said.

The researchers, led by Arne Güllich of RPTU Kaiserlautern-Landau in Germany, noted that prodigies often specialized in a single discipline, pigeonholing themselves in a particular field early in life. By contrast, late bloomers found success across multiple fields.

The study provides key insights into long-debated scientific inquiries into the origins of elite knowledge. While many parents may assume that helping their kids specialize early in life prepares them for successful careers, the latest research suggests otherwise. Early field-specific development can provide short-term success. However, longer-term success is more common among late bloomers.

“World top-10 youth chess players and later world top-10 adult chess players are nearly 90% different individuals across time,” the researchers wrote, suggesting that those who bloom early in life don’t tend to reach the height of their success at the same time late bloomers hit their stride. It also means that child prodigies and late bloomers develop differently and grow up to be fundamentally different people. 

To be sure, talented children usually find success in adulthood. In fact, a 2023 study found that child prodigies tend to earn more and have more career success than the average person.

Güllich and his team also note that their study is limited by its methodology. The research analyzed data from two types of studies: prospective studies, which scrutinize high-performing children over time, and retrospective studies, which looked back at the childhood development of high-achieving adults. Researchers pointed out that it is impossible to assign children to random careers, and that further research is required to understand how early development relates to success later in life.

Still, the study’s findings challenge the emphasis on early signs of high performance that elite schools, conservatories and youth sport academies often look for when recruiting talent.

In fact, earlier research indicates that such training could be detrimental, inspiring burnout. A 2018 NIH study found that “gifted” children had poor perceptions of their physical health, and that gifted kids were more at risk of poor mental health compared to non-gifted kids.

“All the findings obtained in this study suggest that gifted children are at risk in respect of mental health,” it warned.

Following the United States’ capture of Nicolás Maduro over the weekend, a report came out claiming that Venezuela had $60 billion stored in Bitcoin—leading to speculation that the U.S. could lay claim to cryptocurrency as well as oil. Despite numerous reports of the huge Venezuelan Bitcoin stash, however, a crypto forensic firm is skeptical of the claims.