It is difficult to find an Argentine citizen who is not aware of the rise of the dollar of the day. This special attention reflects a broader reality.
To understand what percentage of savings is in foreign currency, we must take into account the amount of dollars that Argentines have in accounts abroad, as well as those many who keep hidden in their homes under the mattress. According to this index, Argentina has a dollarization rate of 70%, one of the highest in the region.
The Argentine currency has had very brief periods of stability in the last 70 years, which has generated a generalised distrust, both from Argentines themselves and from foreign investors. A key event was what CONICET researchers, specialists in the sociology of money, pointed out: the public centrality that the dollar took during the days of the Rodrigazo was the expression of a process that had been brewing since the late 1950s, and even since the 1930s, when the first exchange controls emerged. Since then, the dollar has become a way of interpreting the Argentine economic reality.
Argentines are not only among those who treasure the most dollars outside the United States (according to data from the US Treasury), but they are also among the most aware of their price. What about the dollar in our country? How did it become such a popular and central currency? And when did it become the core of our collective and personal history?
The process of popularising the dollar ceased to be an exclusive subject of experts to become the centre of local market conversations and even a daily issue, present in street talks. Common sense, in different sectors, usually agrees that this predilection reflects the specific macroeconomic conditions of the country and the expectations they generate. Some suggests to the constant inflation cycles since the 1940s, against which the dollar functions as a “refuge”; others refer to the chronic devaluations of the peso, seen as an inevitable consequence of the external restriction, that is, of the structural difficulty of the Argentine economy to generate the dollars it needs to develop.
Over the last half century, almost whenever attempts were made to stabilise the currency, it was done by setting the price of the dollar after a strong devaluation of the peso. Problems such as persistent inflation, price instability, foreign debt, currency shortages and the lack of reliable financial instruments, help to understand why the dollar has assumed such an important role, both in economic practice and in public debate.
During the military dictatorship the desregulation of the dollar was a key point that positioned it as a central reference in Argentine society. Phenomena such as the dollarisation of the real estate market, which was consolidated in the late 1970s, show how the public discussion about the dollar never disappeared, but was fully integrated into everyday financial practises.
In the period 1991–2002, during the presidency of Carlos Menem, the dollar experienced its boom with the convertibility plan, which then ended in a strong crisis with its collapse. Citizens went out to claim their rights, largely related to their savings in dollars. With this, the dollar quotation is a prominent information in the media, to the point that it is used as a parameter to interpret the direction of the financial business.
During the Kirchnerist governments (2003-2015), the difficulty of access to the dollar generated social unrest and was the engine of many protests. Then, between 2015 and 2019, Mauricio Macri’s presidential campaign focussed on removing the restrictions imposed by Kirchnerism. For Macri, the problem was the distrust that the previous government had generated about the US currency.
All things considered, the popularisation of the dollar and its constant presence in the public debate show a generalised attention to this phenomenon, in which everything seems to revolve around that currency. The dollar is perceived as a way to protect yourself from depreciation: saving is doing it in dollars. According to INDEC data updated to December 2024, the liquid external assets of Argentine residents who do not generate income totalled 246,029 million dollars. This confirms that the dollar is not only a matter of price, but a broader way of understanding the economic reality of the country.