One could say that we Argentines wake up every morning verifying three essential pieces of information for our daily activities: the weather, the state of the traffic and the price of the dollar.
I did it when I lived in my country and, although with less fervor, I continue to do it abroad as well.
“The value of the US currency integrates the basic information reported by the Argentine media. Especially in times of monetary turbulence,” say Mariana Luzzi and Ariel Wilkis in their book “The Dollar. History of an Argentine coin (1930-2019)”.
This irony of the book’s title, as the author recognizes, would be lost if the country finally became dollarized, as proposed by the candidate Javier Milei, the libertarian politician who will contest the presidency against the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, in the second round of the November 19th.
In an interview with BBC Mundo, Luzzi explains that the dollar has two lives in Argentina. A private one, which is its status as the currency with which Argentines save or acquire goods such as houses or apartments; and another public one that she considers more important:
“This is what makes the dollar rate appear on all our cell phones, that it reaches us through the application of the bank where we have the account or through the electronic wallet that we use, that we turn on the television and it appears in the same place on the temperature from 10 in the morning when the market opens. And let it be in people’s mouths, in the joke, in the meme“.
But the issue is not only how many lives the dollar has in Argentina, but also the number of different dollars there are in the country.
“There is an obsession with the dollar that is based on economic facts, but there is also an illusory thing: people tell you how is the dollar today? how did he get up? It’s like a beast that grows on its own. And they also have multiple facets, because there are many dollar quotes. I don’t even know how many there are,” Patricio Barton, communicator and radio show host, tells me.
So I ask you to remember:
The dollar quotes that Patricio Barton remembers.
There is the official dollar, which would be like the starting point, with which export and import operations are carried out.
Then there is the blue dollar that doubles it; It is the benchmark of the street, the illegal dollar that some media outlets call informal with a euphemism.
We have the tourist dollar, which is what tourists buy. There is a Qatar dollar, which was the rate with which the card expenses of the Argentines who went to the World Cup were managed. The luxury dollar is for luxury goods that are purchased from Argentina. There is a soy dollar for soybean producers.
The liquid dollar, which are bank reserve dollars. Of course, the future dollar, which is a prophecy of how the dollar will be in a year. The Coldplay dollar, which was a quote for the band that made like 10, 15 stadiums, that is, they raised a lot of money that had to be paid.
There is the big head dollar and the small head dollar, which is neither more nor less than the heroes that are on the dollar bills. And here they don’t take the small-headed ones, which are legal tender, or they give you less money.
It is even possible to give names to dollars that do not exist. If you come and want to exchange dollars for me, and I say “well, this is the dollar, friend,” it is because I am giving it to you with a friendly margin.
The green and the trees
Not only quotes have their own names in Argentina; A particular language has also been created around the dollar, as well as the people who buy and sell it, the place where the buying and selling takes place, and the action of buying and selling it.
“Green: dollar, monetary unit of the United States”. The definition belongs to the third edition of the dictionary of the Argentine Academy of Letters.
“It is rare to have a colloquial word for a foreign currency lexicalized. Lexicalization means that a word that had one meaning acquired a completely different one. It is a powerful phenomenon,” Santiago Kalinowski, director of the Linguistics Department of this Academy, tells BBC Mundo.
“Green”, in addition, serves to name another of Argentine passions: mate.
But there are many other words that arise from Argentines’ passion for the dollar:
The ABC of the dollar in the Argentine language according to Santiago Kalinowski.
A: Little tree
B: Cycling
C: Cave
The first meaning of little tree It was “a person who receives clandestine bets” but speakers usually take advantage of something they already have to refer to a reality that is new.
The second meaning applies to people who on the street, especially around the city of Buenos Aires, the financial sector of Buenos Aires, offer to exchange dollars with the cry “change, change”:
“Illegal money changer who works on public roads.”
For me it has to do with a physical attitude on public roads which is standing there as if it were a little tree, it is being “planted on the sidewalk”.
With B we have “bicycle”, which refers to all these speculations of selling dollars in the morning, buying dollars in the afternoon; all this labyrinth that we have.
With the C is “cave”, “illegal currency exchange agency.” Also “cuevero”, something “related to the money cave”, and “member or employee of a money cave”.
Although the story continues: in the letter D, we also have “dollarize” and “dedollarize”…
Because?
Luzzi indicates that there are two major economic explanations for the obsession with the dollar in Argentina: one attributes it to the effect of persistent inflation and the other, which does not exclude the inflationary factor, to the condition of a peripheral economy.
The second basically refers to the fact that the country “generates through the export of products and services fewer dollars than it needs to import goods and services, and to pay utilities.”
This situation worsens, adds the sociologist, when more external debt is contracted, “because to any outflow of dollars to, for example, pay for imports, we must add the dollars that are needed to pay the debt that was contracted.”
Regarding the inflationary factor I spoke with the economist Fausto Spotorno.
“The dollar is the instrument that the Argentine used to combat inflationto confront the historic destruction of the peso by Argentine economic policy, which is not from now, it is 80 years old,” the director of the UADE Business School (Argentine Business University) tells me.
So, the only way to save for the vast majority (excluding those who have the resources and knowledge to use other financial instruments such as stocks or bonds, or who simply do not have the ability to save) has not been the national currency but the US currency. .
In addition to savings, there is another use for the dollar, as Spotorno explains:
“If I want to carry out a real estate transaction, for example, I have to pay with dollars.
Because?
Because if I wanted to use pesos, I would need to rent a truck to put all the bills that would be needed in a transaction.”
Since when?
For Spotorno there is no doubt: it all began in 1946 when the government of Juan Domingo Perón nationalized the Central Bank.
Two years earlier, representatives from 44 countries had met in the town of Bretton Woods, United States, where they established that the US dollar would be the currency for international transactions.
“And starting in ’46, exactly the same year that we nationalized the Central Bank, inflation appeared: 26% that year and it did not stop until we reached hyperinflation in ’89,” says Spotorno.
After that 1989 crisis, Argentina adopted Convertibility which, as the economist explains, was basically tying the peso to the dollar (1 dollar was worth 1 peso).
This honeymoon with the dollar ended in December 2001 with a brutal divorce, when savings in dollars were confiscated by the State and returned in pesos in the famous “corralito” (another word that is in the dictionary of the Argentine Academy of the letters).
Both before entering Convertibility and before leaving it, there was speculation about a possible dollarization of the economy, which, however, was never carried out.
But Luzzi points out that the fact that Argentina has had inflation since the middle of the last century does not mean that people immediately began to buy dollars; It took – as he says – a process of “familiarization with an element that was previously completely outside the repertoire.”
The expert indicates that the first moment in which the US currency is on the cover of Argentine newspapers and becomes current news is in January 1959 when President Arturo Frondizi launches his stabilization plan.
“From 31 (first regulation of the exchange market in Argentina) until 59, the discussion about whether the State has to intervene in the exchange market, or whether the exchange rate is expensive or cheap, is a discussion by experts in economy, of exporters and importers, but it is not a discussion on the public agenda,” he explains.
It is from 1959 – in the midst of a debate on inflation but also on the opening to international capital and foreign investments – that a process of popularization of the dollarwhich only increased.
And he even became an object of jokes.
Already in 1962, the comedian Mauricio Borensztein, better known as “Tato” Bores, wondered in a famous television monologue why the dollar was always on the rise:
“When Boca (Juniors) loses, the dollar rises three mangoes (pesos); On the Sunday that Boca wins, the dollar rises four mangoes. They announce cold weather for August, catch up, the dollar is losing sight. A minister resigns, people are scared, the dollar is eight pesos more expensive. A new minister comes, people buy dollars up to their ears.”
In the second part of the 70s – with the liberalization of the exchange market and the policy of financial openness of the military regime – Luzzi indicates that The dollar went from being relevant information to being a tool for daily operations.
The inflationary process that would last a decade, including the seven years of dictatorship (1976-1983), put the finishing touch to the rise of the dollar, which became the savings method.
“The weight is no longer useful,” says Luzzi.
The weight
You cannot talk about Argentines’ obsession with the dollar without talking about their conflictive relationship with their national currency, which has also changed four times in the last half century.
Yes well n Argentina had the same currency (the national peso) from 1881 to 1970, from then on inflation forced them to change names (peso ley, Argentine peso, austral, peso) and to remove zeros from the bills with increasing frequency .
Along with coups d’état (six in the 20th century), the constant devaluation of the currency has been one of the permanent traumas of this country.
“For me, Argentina suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. We have a kind of childhood of abuse and, above all, a double message. If you want to psychotize a child, give him double messages. “This way you are going to create a psychotic with chronic uncertainty,” clinical psychologist Alicia Blanco tells me.
The “double messages” (saying something and doing something else) have been very typical of the history of Argentines with the peso and the dollar.
An Economy Minister of the last de facto government said “he who bets on the dollar loses” and a few days later he devalued the peso by 30%. In the “corralito”, a democratic government approved a law of intangibility of deposits and a few months later confiscated all dollar deposits.
Taking advantage of the fact that, in addition to buying dollars and drinking mate, many Argentines are regular visitors to the psychologist, I ask Alicia Blanco how she would describe the relationship between Argentines, the dollar and the peso, if they were to go to therapy.
Madame Bobary and the dollar according to Alicia Blanco
Argentinity is linked to the Argentine peso, a peso that is like having a partner devalued 800 times, mistreated, changed names.
The guy or the guy has no identity. You look at it, you look at her, and you say, who did I marry? Who did I choose?
Then you start to fantasize like in any relationship where you are not satisfied, where you are not happy.
You look outside and you see the dollar, the blonde with blue eyes that for 70 years had the backing of gold.
So when you see the tycoon and you fall in love with him, you will develop a passion that is what I call destructive passions.
We can take the model of Madame Bovary.
She has a husband and falls in love with a lover who is a blackmailer who cheats on her, who manipulates her in every possible way, but she believes everything and loves him deeply to the point of wanting to leave her husband and son abandoned. .
And then the guy, when she goes looking for him, is not there. And she commits suicide. This is the model of destructive passion par excellence.
It’s like anxiety, that is, she can’t get what she wants, but she keeps craving it and the craving is what keeps her in that place; He suffers from the longing, but because of the longing he also recovers that look towards the lover that is unattainable.
No compass
In October 2023, Argentina’s National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) reported that September inflation was 12.7%, the highest monthly value in the last 32 years. And the interannual rate exceeded 138%.
“What I believe happens with inflation regimes as high as these, at the level of personal experience, is that at a moment you no longer have references, the relative prices are lost, you no longer know what is expensive and what is cheap” , philosopher Eial Moldavsky tells me.
“Two pairs of sneakers are worth the same as a rental. And you tell me, is it wrong, is it right? I don’t know, I have no way of telling you,” she exemplifies.
The absence of reference frames prevents, as Moldavsky indicates, any possibility of planning:
“It is very difficult to have a job and know if with that salary that you negotiated in March, and that seemed good to you, you will be able to get through the year in a reasonable way, paying rent and having a more or less normal life.”
On his Instagram site, where one and a half million people follow him, Moldavsky analyzes everyday situations and existential fears such as the fear of rejection or the sense of guilt, while ironing his clothes, watering his plants and tidying his house.
In the middle of the video he introduces the thoughts of a philosopher who serves as a frame of reference to understand these problems.
I ask you, to finish this note, if your video was about Argentines and the dollar, which philosopher would you turn to…
Eial Moldavsky, Hannah Arendt and the islands in an ocean of chaos.
It is actually very difficult to know what theoretical framework fits something as complicated as this.
I understand that Argentina’s relationship with the dollar has to do with the difficulty that Argentina had in being able to build stability and predictability; and well, the dollar appeared as an almost intuitive answer.
If I wanted to draw a parallel, we would think of something like what Hannah Arendt says regarding the future, like that completely infinite sea, impossible to manage and predict. Full of indecision, of things we don’t control, of things we don’t know.
And one tries to create small islands to try to resist the chaos that is the unpredictable future.
The dollar seems to be something like that, the island that Argentine citizens intuitively found in moments of crisis.
It seems to me that the dollar appeared as a reserve of stability in the midst of all that chaos.
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