The Peso is dead. Long live crypto.
The Peso is dead. Long live crypto.
Plagued by decades of inflation, Argentinians are taking matters into their own hands by adopting and innovating around cryptocurrencies, especially stablecoins.
The Realistic Optimist provides weekly, in-depth analyses of some of the hottest stories in our now globalized startup world. Subscribe below to receive it directly to your inbox and don’t hesitate to share it with like-minded people :)
A tumultuous economic history
A century ago, Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, attracting swaths of European immigrants looking for better economic opportunities. Today, Argentina is seen as an economic anomaly, being one of the only countries to go from a “developed” to a “developing” status. Economist Simon Kuznets famously said: “there are four types of countries: developing, developed, Japan (no one knows why it grows), and Argentina (no one knows why it doesn’t).”
Although the reasons for Argentina’s economic debacle are still up for debate, the main culprit seems to be continuous, unsustainable government spending combined with an over-reliance on commodity exports, resulting in frequent boom-and-bust cycles responsible for consistently destabilizing the economy. Argentina’s infamous political polarization, referred to as la grieta (the rift), means the country’s governance alternates between Peronist, Argentina’s left-wing ideology, and pro-business center-right governments. The constant ping pong between these two governance styles makes it hard for the country to maintain a singular and coherent economic path, while both government styles have their own, erroneous, ways of dealing with inflation.