It is startling to read a book published in 1965 which concludes with the prediction that things will soon look up for the Argentine economy, provided the Marshall Plan succeeds. The explanation is that Quintero Ramos’ work was a doctoral thesis of 1950 which for some reason was published fifteen years later without any revision by the author in the light of the many statistics and analyses which have appeared in the meantime.
Perhaps this is just as well. The author’s methodology is preeminently to clip and paste. Chapter by tedious chapter, we follow the Argentine currency and banking institutions from colonial times to Perón, through a catalogue of monetary and banking legislation, interspersed with disconnected statistics and obiter dicta snatched piecemeal from treasury or bank reports and other histories. There are no systematic generalizations about the interaction between the monetary and real sectors of the Argentine economy or of the social and political forces influencing monetary policy at various phases of Argentine history—much less systematic efforts to validate such generalizations. We can guess, therefore, that a revision to include the eventful years since 1950 would have meant merely adding another chapter of cataloguing plus an uncritical mixture of other people’s generalizations. To those with a general knowledge of Argentine economic history, the book may be useful for its recitation of monetary and banking legislation. For analysis and interpretation of Argentine financial history, however, the reader will have to look elsewhere.
