Eduardo Rabuffetti honeymooned in Miami in 1999 and has been to the US once before. He probably knows more about the bill than most Americans.
He claims to be able to pick out a fake by touching it. He can tell you the exact amount. Ten half-inch stacks are small enough to fit in a single hand. He has walked down the streets of Buenos Aires with tens of thousands of dollars in his jacket.
Mr. Rabuffetti, a property developer who has built two office towers and a house here, bought the land for each of them in $100 bills.
Nobody signs anything if you don't see the money. You get used to it after the number of crises we've been through.
Mr Rabuffetti is not the only one. Land, houses, cars, expensive art are all done in tall stacks of U.S. currency. In order 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.
Argentines hold a lot of U.S. currency, and sometimes it gets thrown away. The Argentine dump was filled with tens of thousands of dollars last month.
The dollar is king in Argentina due to the depreciation of the Argentine peso. A year ago, it was possible to buy $1 on the black market. The cost to buy a buck is . Prices are going up because of the peso's decline. Inflation is expected to hit 90 percent by the end of the year.
Argentina knows how to live with inflation better than the rest of the world.
The country has struggled with rising prices for a long time. The late 1980s were a time when residents rushed to get groceries before clerks with price guns could make their rounds. Since the beginning of the year, inflation has gone over 30 percent each year.
We spent two weeks talking to economists, politicians, farmers, restaurateurs, realtors, barbers, taxi drivers, moneychangers, street vendors and the unemployed to understand how Argentines cope. In Argentina, the economy animated everyone, eliciting curses, sighs andinformed opinions about monetary policy. One woman happily showed off her hiding spot, another explained how she stuffed cash into her bra to buy a condo, and a woman from Venezuela wondered if she had come to the right country.
Argentines have a strange relationship with their money.
As soon as they get their money, they spend it. They purchase everything in installments. They don't think banks are trustworthy. Credit is hardly used by them. They don't know how much things should cost after years of price increases.
People will find a way to adapt to high inflation in Argentina, living in an economy that is impossible to imagine anywhere else in the world. The upside-down system works well for those with the means. Few who have held political power during times of economic distress have found themselves paying a real price.
Juan Piantoni is the head of Ingot, a safe-deposit-box company where business is booming as Argentines pay to store their cash. He thinks we are on the verge of a major crisis. No one has started a fire. We will see what we are up against after that.
Things have been mostly calm. Wages for a lot of jobs are going up. Rents can be raised at the same rate. There are restrictions on buying U.S. dollars in Argentina.
In the wealthier areas of Argentina's capital, construction continues and restaurants and bars are full. Anchoita, one of the city's hippest restaurants, will have dinner reservations for two in January 2023.
People in poorer neighborhoods collect scrap cardboard to sell, pool their money for food and swap used goods in order to avoid the peso. Argentina's poor don't have jobs with automatic wage increases, and they don't have extra money to spend in the U.S. They are left with little to no money while everything around them costs more. The percentage of Argentines living in poverty has gone up.
Argentina's economic minister resigned. The peso lost 26 percent of its value over the course of 26 days. The economic minister was fired by the president. There have been 21 times when an Argentine economic minister lasted less than two months.
The war in Ukraine, supply-chain constraints and big increases in public spending are all related to Argentina's recent bout with hyperinflation.
Many economists think that Argentina's inflation is self-destructive. The country spends more on health care, universities, energy and transportation than it takes in. It prints more money to make up for the shortfall.
The government of Argentina has been asked by the International Monetary Fund to cut its budget deficit. One of the most significant steps in years was taken by the new minister on Wednesday, when he promised to stop printing pesos to fund the budget.
Many Argentines were skeptical that the country was prepared to make difficult decisions.
"We might need the patient to have a heart attack before the family says, 'Let's do the surgery,'" said Hugo Mon, one of the country's top investigative journalists and a best-selling author. How many people will end up poor because of that? There will be a lot of people leaving the country.
The current situation in Argentina is not as bad as 2001, when there was a run on the banks.
Argentines rushed to get their money before it was lost because foreign investors thought the Argentine peso was worth less than the official rate. The government stopped withdrawals and gave everyone a haircut. The president decided to leave the government offices in a helicopter in order to avoid the angry crowds in the plaza.
The angry crowd is still in the plaza. Several thousand Argentines gathered there last month to protest.
There was a metal vat with peanuts and sugar in it. She was selling a bag of peanuts for 200 pesos, or about 70 cents, less than a week ago. That increase didn't keep up with her expenses. The items she needed to package the treat had gone up in price in the past few weeks. She took on debt for the first time to support her children.
She said that there was nothing that could regulate the prices. They don't want it. The government can't. And that is our responsibility.
It is a story that has been told before in Argentina. Argentina doubled the size of its largest bank note to 1,000 pesos in order to make it more affordable on the black market. The note's value is about the price of a Big Mac. An Apple product can now cost more than a million dollars.
Argentines have lost their sense of worth. Menus change frequently. The taxi meters are adjusted frequently. Price tags are not always up to date.
The hardware store is the size of a walk in closet. He doesn't know the price of every product he sells.
He checks his computer for every sale because they change every few days and are updated in a running list. He has mostly stopped using price tags.
He showed the scissors that the supplier said should cost 600 pesos. He said that a month ago it was 400 pesos. It used to be worth 120 pesos.
He looked like he was frustrated. I think it is sad. He said that it was always this way for him. I would be living in the United States if I wasn't 51 years old.
In recent weeks, many companies have stopped sales to see where the prices are going to go, making it hard to find certain items, such as cooking oil and car parts. The economic benefits of a commodity boom that should benefit Argentina are being blunted by some farmers who are holding onto their wheat and soy.
Noelia was selling her last stock of toilet paper at the shop. She raised her prices because her suppliers told her they had no more. The price of a pack of four single-ply rolls has gone up 50 percent. She said there would be a shortage.
Her friend said that she had never understood the bidet.
A publicist named Ignacio Jauand buys everything he can in installments, including his bed, clothes, and a computer.
It's not that he can't pay for them. He thinks the value of the peso will fall. His final payments would cost less if he is correct. He said that the bet has always been successful. He said that the last installments cost him two or three Mcdonald's combo.
He said buying stuff beats inflation.
The motto of Argentina is that. You need to spend them as quickly as possible.
Shop owners stock up on inventory while people go out to eat or buy things, and they bet prices will go up. Eduardo Levy Yeyati is an Argentine economist and visiting professor at Harvard University. I feel like I lose money by keeping it in the bank.
Maybe Argentines like to buy things. The amount of money in dollars.
Most of the foreign financial assets held by Argentine households and nonfinancial firms are in the U.S. The majority of that money is held in international bank accounts, but some is stashed in safes and hiding places across the country.
The government restricts Argentines from buying more than $200 in U.S. currency per month because of their dependence on the dollar. The official government exchange rate for the U.S. dollar is 130 pesos for every U.S. dollar.
The difference between the exchange rate used for Western Union wires and the one used for the black market is less than 300 pesos. The rate is a truer measure of the open market's view of the peso.
Men and women are hawking dollars on street corners. Buyers are led to caves where they can change the money in private.
Police standing nearby don't seem to mind. The market is used by a lot of people.
Three of Juan's regular clients are police officers. He agreed to speak if only his first name was used.
The black market moves millions of dollars a day. Much of the economy here depends on those dollars.
She has completed hundreds of deals, but never one in pesos. The dollar bills that the sellers require are big-faced. There are no small-faced bills accepted.
Benjamin Franklin's face is being questioned. New $100 notes with Mr. Franklin's enlarged portrait are harder to counterfeit, so they are offered 3 percent more in the black market.
Seven Argentines said they paid for their properties in cash, but few were willing to allow their names to be printed because they were worried about being audited.
To get to the bank to close the deal, they said they had to put a lot of money down their pants and into grocery bags. People with a lot of money have hired armored trucks.
A financial services worker in Argentina said that when she sold her family's farm for $1 million a few years ago, the buyer gave her a duffel bag full of 10,000 $100 bills. After buying her apartment, she put $100,000 of the cash into the pockets of her coat and went to her buyers home. The sellers wanted to count each bill by hand.
Adela Castillo and her husband took a huge risk after they lost their jobs during the Pandemic. The home they converted into a shop was in a poor neighborhood.
It was starting to pay off. New affordable housing in the neighborhood was being built by the government. She needed a forklift to get around. She needed $15,000 to purchase one.
A bank wouldn't make that kind of loan, but she had a friend who had a lot of it. She said it was a big favor. It's not possible to lend money like that.
The forklift was purchased by her. She stated that it helped a lot. The value of the Mexican currency continued to fall. He wants me to repay him in cash. She said that he doesn't want money. She has ballooned her debt due to the decline in the value of the peso.
She said that the situation was a messed up one, with limestone dust in her hair and down her fleece. She didn't know how she would pay off the debt. She said we're treading water. "We're fighting"
Poor Argentines are trying to avoid the peso because of it's decline.
The mother and her baby were standing in the cold. She didn't have enough money to buy diapers but she did need them. After a stroke, Ms. Lpez was blind and her husband was a construction worker. His wages didn't increase while the prices did.
She didn't need pesos next to the bus stop. She had sacks of powdered milk, handouts from the government, that she could trade in order to make sure her baby had a diaper.
A woman set up shop on the street corner to barter, and she gave Ms. Lpez a 12-pack of diapers, two bags of sugar, and a box of cookies. The 8-year-old daughter of Ms. Lpez ripped into the cookies.
She said that her family and siblings all come here. They have a lot of kids as well.
During the 2001 run on the banks, half a million people met in so-called "trueque" clubs to swap goods. The clubs are making a comeback, despite the fact that they mostly disintegrated over the years.
On a recent Sunday, nearly 100 people swapped their wares: used clothes, cleaning supplies, homemade pizza dough, and fried quince pastries. The club's own currency was printed onto white paper.
The women were shopping at their neighbors tables. The crédito was preferred by all of them.
An announcement was made that they were exchanging older, smaller denominations for newer, larger ones. She showed a lot of old notes. The 1,000-credito note was introduced last year.
The crédito was experiencing inflation as well.
Natalie contributed to the story.
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