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With the world grappling with rising prices, a tour through Argentina reveals that years of inflation can give rise to a truly bizarre economy.
Argentina has dealt with rapidly rising prices for much of the past 50 years. People have been left with little idea of how much things should cost.Credit...
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By Jack Nicas and Ana Lankes
Photographs by Sebastián López Brach
Jack Nicas and Ana Lankes, correspondents in South America, spent two weeks traveling around Buenos Aires to understand how Argentines have adapted to years of high inflation.
BUENOS AIRES — Eduardo Rabuffetti is an Argentine who has been to the United States once, his 1999 honeymoon in Miami. Yet he probably knows the $100 bill better than most Americans.
He says he can pick out a counterfeit by touch. He can tell you exactly what $100,000 looks like. (Ten half-inch stacks, small enough to hold in one hand.) And on numerous occasions, he has walked down the streets of Buenos Aires with tens of thousands of U.S. dollars tucked into his jacket.
That is because Mr. Rabuffetti, a property developer who has built two office towers and a house here, bought the land for each of those buildings in $100 bills.
“Here, if you don’t actually see the money, nobody signs anything,” he said. “After the number of crises we’ve been through, let’s just say you get used to it.”
It is not just Mr. Rabuffetti. Nearly every big purchase in Argentina — land, houses, cars, expensive art — is done in tall stacks of U.S. currency. To save up, Argentines stuff bundles of American bills into old clothes, beneath floor boards and in bombproof safe deposit boxes past nine locked gates and five stories beneath the ground.
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