In the United States, the dollar exists, period. In Argentina, however, there is the official dollar, the starting point, because in addition there is the blue dollar, which is sold on the streets for double the value of the first, and the tourist dollar, for visitors’ credit cards.
There are also, in the accounts of radio host Patrício Barton, the Qatar dollar, which governed Argentine fans who went to the 2002 World Cup, the luxury dollar for very expensive goods, the soy dollar for grain exports, the net dollar, that of bank reserves, or the future dollar, what the currency could be worth a year from now.
Next to them, the Coldplay dollar was born, which was specially paid to the band after fifteen concerts in the country last year, the big head dollar and the small head dollar, taking into account the size of the representation of American heroes on the banknotes, with the former even equal to the seconds, they are worth more. And the friendly dollar, as the Argentinians call it with a good exchange rate. If you read the newspapers you will still find references to the Netflix dollar and the Spotify dollar.
The dollar even generated new words in traditional dictionaries, as noted by Santiago Kalinowski, director of the Academy’s Department of Linguistics, on BBC News Mundo. In dictionaries, “green” is no longer just a color, it’s dollars.
“Arbolito” (little tree) are the people who stand on the street and shout “cambio”, “bicicleteos” (stairs), the speculative changes from morning to afternoon in the value of the dollar, “cuevas” (caves), illegal exchange offices, and so on up to the letter Z.
To understand the reasons behind Argentina’s obsession with the US currency, when it all started and where it could end as Javier Milei, a far-right candidate whose main promise is to abolish the peso and dollarize the country’s economy, spoke to DN with Mariana Luzzi, co-author with Ariel Wilkis of the book El dollar: Historia de una Moneda Argentina (1930-2019). The already ironic title could no longer be that if Milei defeats his Peronist opponent Sergio Massa, the current Minister of Economic Affairs, on Sunday.
Luzzi explains that “in Argentina the real estate market has been dollarized since more or less the 80s, that is to say: to have a house, the dream of every family, you must have dollars, but in other areas, such as agriculture, you need dollars. production, the reference for grams and kilos is the dollar and in several sectors, such as the automotive industry, the dollar was dollarized, today that is not the case.”
“That’s why in Argentina they say that asking how the dollar is doing is like asking what the weather is like, what the traffic is like,” he adds.
“All this, according to what we have researched, is the result of a long historical process. It was not the result of an event, a crisis, a decision of an authority, but we can say that the late 1950s was a time of economic and political reforms, the opening of the economy to foreign capital, the first agreements with the International Monetary Fund and other international organizations, the dollar is starting to be talked about a lot in the specialized press.”
“Later,” continues the writer and researcher at the Universidad General Sarmiento, “in the 1970s it jumped from the economic pages and reached the front pages, the headlines, it was no longer just a matter of companies, but became a matter of all families. working class”.
And is the dollarization that Milei wants to impose logical? “It is of course logical, taking into account the principles that Milei defends. The problem is not that it is illogical, but that it could be catastrophic,” the academic warns.
According to Luzzi, “he wants a zero state, or almost, without a central bank, without the Argentine government being able to issue money. He intends to leave the state, as he himself said, with its hands tied by stopping the issuance of money.” Fine, but this way your hands are tied to the US Federal Bank…”.
Source: DN
