Buying dollars in Argentina is not a financial decision. It’s a reflex. One learned through decades of devaluations, bank freezes, and forced pesifications that are not just historical events, but ingrained memory passed down from generation to generation. While economists designed positive interest rates and carry trade schemes to lure savers back to the peso, Argentines broke the all-time record for currency purchases in 2025: $32.34 billion dollars. Market logic alone cannot explain it. It takes psychology, sociology, and neuroscience to understand why, in this country, the dollar stopped being a currency and became something far deeper: an emotion.
By Gisela ColomboWhy
are Argentines ‘dollar-dependent’?
According to INDEC, Argentines keep almost 246,000 million dollars outside the financial system. A figure comparable – in some quarters, higher – to the entire private external debt of the country. It is not a market data. It is a cultural portrait.
Against logic
Last year that trend not only continued: it deepened. The net purchase of banknotes and foreign currency by individuals reached an all-time high of 32,340 million dollars in 2025, surpassing even the worst records of the exchange rate crisis of the Cambiemos government. What makes this data especially significant is not only its magnitude, but also the context in which it occurred: a period of relative exchange rate stability, with positive real rates and a “carry trade” that, in theory, should have seduced savers towards the peso. He didn’t. They continued to buy dollars with a constancy that defies conventional financial logic.
Companies such as N5, whose CEO Julián Colombo has been working for years to modernize the regional financial infrastructure, are well aware of this paradox: technology improves the banking experience, but it is difficult to modify the emotional memory of savers alone.
Why would someone choose a currency that, in many periods, yields less than the available alternatives? Part of the answer is offered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their work showed that the pain of losing is psychologically far more powerful than the pleasure of winning an equivalent amount. For an Argentine saver, holding pesos – no matter how profitable it may be in nominal terms – implies exposing oneself to a risk that is not theoretical but lived: the possibility of an abrupt loss, already experienced more than once. No rate differential compensates for that memory. The one who dollarizes is not irrational: he is solving, with the only tool he trusts, an equation in which the risk of losing what he has accumulated always exceeds the attraction of earning a little more.
But the explanation is not exhausted in individual psychology. It is also a social construction. Mariana Luzzi and Ariel Wilkis showed that the link between Argentines and the dollar was not consolidated as a result of isolated decisions, but through persistent cultural mediations—the press, advertising, literature—that contributed to transforming it, over time, into something more than a reserve currency. The dollar has become a unit of measurement of reality. The language in which value, the future and, above all, certainty are expressed.
The phenomenon of “No”
When we refer to the contribution made by the press, politics and the media, we are not referring to the direct act of promotion. In some cases, the collective decision is fueled by the news that many are taking action. A phenomenon close to what has been called “FOMO” lately.
And, in other cases, on the other hand, it is the prohibition that awakens the compulsion. Policies that have penalized the purchase of dollars tended to enlarge the business. Neuroscience knows today that there is no ‘no’ in consciousness. When something is denied, the mind registers that something, not the negation. Therefore, the traps only increased the need. Those who did not compare the same in black markets, however, saw the desire to do so grow.
Viviana Zelizer provides another key. People do not use money in a neutral way: they classify it, differentiate it, load it with social meanings. Each coin is, in this sense, a moral construction as well as an economic one.
In Argentina, this particularization has an unequivocal protagonist. The dollar accumulated decades of very specific experience: it is the currency that did not lie. While the peso was repeatedly devalued, frozen, weighted, split and restricted, the greenback remained a stable reference. Not because it is immune to inflation – it is not – but because it is predictably imperfect. And that predictability, in a country crossed by economic surprise, has a value that no rate can fully compensate.
This is where the central paradox appears. The dollar does not protect the market. Protects from distress. It is not, strictly speaking, a financial instrument. It is an object of trust in a society where institutional trust was eroded, rebuilt, and eroded again several times in the same century.
Sociologist Paul Connerton offers an additional clue: our experience of the present depends, to a large extent, on our knowledge of the past. The relationship of Argentines with the dollar is not explained by looking at current interest rates, but by the repertoire of crises that is transmitted from generation to generation. Devaluations, corralitos, compulsive pesifications: they are not only historical events, they are incorporated habits. The practice of dollarization is not learned every time. It is inherited.
The greatest paradox, however, is political. The Argentine State maintains a relationship with the dollar that oscillates between regulation and dependence. It restricts it, unfolds it, criticizes it in discourse and persecutes it in practice. And, at the same time, in the private sphere, it validates it as a store of value. The exchange clamp, in this sense, functions as an implicit admission: the State recognizes that it cannot compete with the dollar in the only area that matters, that of credibility.
So an uncomfortable question is worth asking: how many generations of monetary stability are needed for an Argentine to save in his own currency again? The answer, for now, is uncertain. A society’s financial memory is not rewritten with an economic program or with a cycle of low inflation. It is transformed with decades of institutional consistency, something that Argentina has not yet managed to consolidate.
Until that happens, the cushion will continue to be the best monetary insurance. Not because Argentines distrust for no reason. But because they learned—with remarkable precision—to trust only that which never surprised them.
