Will Argentina Ditch the Peso for the Dollar?
The front-runner in the presidential race says he would make the greenback the official currency and “blow up” the central bank.
The Argentine peso has had a tumultuous life. In the 1980s it was temporarily dethroned by a new currency called the austral. An arranged marriage with the dollar in 1991 produced some years of bliss but ended in a ruinous divorce. More recently, the peso has suffered the humiliation of being tagged the worst-performing currency in emerging markets.
Now an Argentine economist running for president is proposing to put the currency out of its misery once and for all. Javier Milei, who’s also a congressman, says that to quash triple-digit inflation, the nation should formally adopt the dollar. “The peso melts like ice in the Sahara Desert,” Milei likes to say, alluding to the currency’s rapid depreciation: It’s lost half of its value against the dollar just in the past year.