In Argentina, the miracle of the multiplication of banknotes

At the beginning of August, I took a plane to Buenos Aires. I leave Paris around 11:00 p.m. It’s summer. Fourteen hours later, I land in Buenos Aires, around 8:00, and it’s winter.

To get to the city center, I have to change euros at a currency exchange office. For the first time in my life, I am witnessing a miracle: the miracle of the multiplication of banknotes. For a 100 euro note, I receive a hundred 1000 peso notes, which do not fit in my wallet. I feel rich. But, actually, I’m not. I have to leave a third of this money to the taxi driver who takes me downtown.

An all-out price surge

Since my last stay in Buenos Aires, just eight months ago, prices have increased exponentially. The annual inflation rate is 263%. A hundred times more than in France. At the supermarket, an old woman I don’t know speaks to me to complain about the rise in the price of milk, in a country which still has 1,486,248 head of cows for a population of 46,000,000. of inhabitants. My friends, too, only talk about the acceleration of prices. This monotony is not without advantage. By talking about the same thing all the time, we tackle new topics that we never thought we would tackle before. For example, how much did the tomato we are eating in a salad cost, or how much we paid for the last electricity bill, which increased by 700%. The numbers, which make the world go round, also make my head spin. What’s behind these numbers?

An economic situation that looks like a nightmare

Numbers are supposed to objectively measure facts. But facts cannot be completely measured by numbers. There is always an immeasurable remainder. At the heart of these clues there is a core of capitalism’s nonsense, which the surge in prices in Argentina exposes in a cruel way, as if magnified by a magnifying glass. The slumber of the economy breeds monsters.

In Argentina this monster is called, among other names, inflation. Prices are a fiction. Argentina is a mess. Each time a desire is satisfied, it shrinks until it disappears.