Ia! Ia! Peso ftagn!
In a local Argentinian context is the Dollar the “outside eldritch incontrollable force” entire governments have crashed and sunk trying to control it.
But once the U.S. treasury enters the fray… is more like the whole “Peso/Dollar” interaction is cursed.
The basic problem is that we have no faith in our currency and have fetishized the Dollar to the level of a Lovecraftian God.
When the Dollar raises, the price of EVERYTHING raises the next day, not necessarily because of rational motives (say, because they contain imported parts) but because it’s an article of faith that if the Dollar raises the prices do so too.
(And if , somehow, the Dollar loses some ground, the prices stay raised).
Everybody is desperate to get them greenbacks (specially the “Cara grande” ones, the ones with the big Ben Franklin face, the older ones in which Ben’s face is smaller are considered of less value for some reason).
Thus unless the treasury is prepared to buy the entire surplus money of every Argentinian citizen each month in pesos for the foreseeable future, the Dollar will continue to raise.
And since it’s obvious that that is not the case, the peso is doomed to take at least a 50% devaluation sooner than later, which makes everyone even more desperate to buy Dollars…
At a guess, I’d say perhaps because the older design bills are more vulnerable to being counterfeited, and quite a few entities made counterfeits of them for a while, many of which are likely still in circulation.
That’s the excuse, but the hysteria is not justified, there have been no cases of counterfeiting that I’m aware of.
When I bought my house last year, I had to verify one by one each Benjamin to check that they were “Cara Grande” (“Did you buy your house in cash?” I hear you ask, oh sweet summer child…)
Here in the U.S. local media will occasionally put out alerts about counterfeit bills in circulation, so it does happen from time to time. I wonder if there’s a tendency for bogus bucks to migrate overseas, or be passed there, where they might be less likely to run through a bank that would check them for validity.
That’s the economic theory of wheat and bread. Wheat goes up, bread goes up. Wheat falls, bread stays up.
When I was a slot mechanic for a while the law in Nevada was that if a machine took cash – and all of them did 25 years ago – any jackpot had to be paid in cash.* As a mechanic I had to verify the jackpot was valid and witness the payout. The largest I personally saw was $13,000 but once when I came on shift they were still working on a $50,000+ payout.
*An exception was made for the wide area progressive machines where a payout could be over $10-million. Then a representative of the company running it would come out to verify and be photographed with one of those giant ceremonial checks. I never saw a hit on those in my seven years as a mechanic.
I’m sorry, are you saying you bought your house in US currency? In Argentina?
Have read today’s Krugman substack you already quoted, where he states that he only knows one Argentinian band (he usually finishes his posts with a link to a video he deems fitting to his current subject). He clearly needs your help.
There’s no other way to buy a house.
As I said, nobody has faith in our currency, furthermore nobody has faith in banks after what happened in 2001.
So, to buy my house what I did was painstakingly buy dollars each month, take them out of the bank, stuff them under my mattress (well, not really there but that’s the traditional hiding site) until I had enough to buy the house.
Then I went to a notary public with the seller, gave her the dollars and signed a few papers.
You can get a loan to buy a house too (I fortunately was able to avoid doing that, since the loans are either in dollars (and thus susceptible to multiply the debt manyfold once the dollar shoots up) or have ginormous interest rates)) but if you do you use the loan to buy cash dollars to pay for your house.
If I had saved pesos instead of dollars I would’ve never be able to reach the amount necessary since the peso severely devaluated between when I started to save and when I bought the house.
And for the same reason the house selling price was always published in dollars.
Thanks for elaborating. That is something.
I tried to log in to the comment section to fix that inadmissible state of affairs but I couldn’t.
Knowing Argentinians though, I’m sure there are now several comments recommending Soda Stereo, Los Redonditos de Ricota, Seru Giran, etc, etc, etc.
I knew you would try! 
For further elaboration I would read the wikiarticle on currency substitution, also called dollarización in Argentina and Perú. Note that the map on that article is wrong: Argentina is depicted in white, where it should be green, as Frodo has described.
I’m always more than happy to talk about myself and my country 
Also I left out something, in an effort to keep the dollar at bay without selling our reserves, at various points while I was saving for my house it was actually illegal for banks to sell dollars to particulars.
So I had to resort to buying them from shady characters who deal in the “blue dollar” outside banks and paying them about 20 to 50% more than the “official” exchange rate.
You haven’t lived until you are taking a cab in front of a bank in downtown Buenos Aires with 10 million pesos (in 100 peso bills!) in a bag to go to the house of somebody you never met, to exchange them for about 8 thousand dollars and then have to return to your home in the suburbs with about 4 month of wages in dollars burning a hole in your pocket…
I am trying to put myself in the shoes of somebody for whom overpaying to the tune of 20 to 50% is a rational economic strategy. 
It can be argued that it was not really “overpaying” as the official dollar was a fiction and the real dollar was the unofficial one.
However it was not so cut and dried, for importers for example the official dollar was obtainable, just not for particulars.
Remember this?
Today the treasury continued to sell dollars but the dollar went up to 1485 pesos…
And the memes continue to appear at even faster rates
“Don’t take all the dollars mister!”
I imagine Bessent like this at this moment:
I saw a meme with a picture of Milei looking directly at the camera with a sour or tough look, instead of the smile I’ve seen in other photos.
My snap reaction was that he looks like the old-school working-class leader of a rough-and-tumble semi-corrupt detective squad in a gritty 1970s British police drama.
His hairdo is at Trumpian levels of “he thinks it looks good but It. Does. Not.”
A post was split to a new topic: Return troll, same story as last time
Fascinating. Of course, the challenge now is I’m not entirely convinced the dollar is all that stable anymore. Or won’t be for long.