ONE ECONOMY TO RULE THEM ALL:

[I]f Argentina had never taken multiple zeros off its currency several times since 1916, when the exchange rate was 2 pesos per dollar, today it would take 10,000,000,000,000,000 (ten quadrillion) of those original pesos to buy a dollar!

The spark behind the latest peso plunge is Sunday's presidential election. The front-runner, Javier Milei, promises to ditch the peso and dollarize the economy. Which, in my opinion, is the only sensible thing to do, though it might prove tricky to implement. The Argentine government has been resorting to the printing presses to finance its profligate spending for far too long. People know that every day you hold a 2,000 peso note (the largest note in circulation!) in your pocket you are losing money at the rate of 150-200% per year--i.e., the current rate of inflaton. So the demand for pesos has plunged and the demand for dollars has soared. No wonder Argentines are demanding radical change--this has gone on for far too long.

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