Milei Campaigned on Dollarizing Argentina. As President, He Stopped Talking About It.

Resumen detallado

Argentina has spent 80 years failing to keep its currency stable. During the 2023 presidential campaign, Javier Milei promised a reform to stop the pattern: abolish the peso and…

The December 2026 issue of Reason explores Argentine President Javier Milei's accomplishments and what is yet to be done.

Argentina has spent 80 years failing to keep its currency stable. During the 2023 presidential campaign, Javier Milei promised a reform to stop the pattern: abolish the peso and adopt the dollar.

Dollarization was central to his platform. Argentina's monetary institutions had failed too many times to be trusted again. The solution, he said, was to take the currency out of the Argentine government's hands altogether. More than two years later, the peso is still here, and as president, Milei has largely stopped talking about the dollarization he once saw as essential.

Milei's government has made real progress against inflation. Monthly inflation has fallen from 25.5 percent when Milei took office to roughly 2 percent today. That's a genuine achievement. But inflation fell faster under both Ecuador's dollarization in 2000 and Argentina's own currency board in the early 1990s, and neither coincided with a recession as severe as Argentina's recent one.

Dollarization was meant to keep today's progress from becoming just another stabilization that failed to survive the next election. Why did it disappear from Milei's agenda?

The standard advice to a country with Argentina's problems is to do what its more economically stable neighbors do: run a sound fiscal policy, let an independent central bank manage the currency, and allow inflation to fall over time. Peru, Uruguay, and Chile have all followed versions of that path.

Argentina has tried it too. Repeatedly. In the 1990s it adopted a currency board, and beginning in 2016 it tried inflation targeting under a well-regarded central bank. Both were technically reasonable, but each ended in a currency crisis that made future stabilization efforts harder to trust.

The problem was never a shortage of competent technocrats. Argentina keeps alternating between two economic policy regimes: One government stabilizes…

The…

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