So what is happening? Argentina is a mess. Bad governments, excessive money printing, years of inflation and repeated government bankruptcies have resulted in an economy that is not functioning well. As you can see in the article, the exchange rate of the peso was ARSUSD=0.056 at the beginning of the year (i.e. 5.6 US cents per peso; ARSUSD is the amount of US dollars per one Argentine peso) and now is ARSUSD=0.026. In other words, the peso lost a bit over half of its value. Alternatively speaking, the value of the US dollar in Peso has more than doubled, from USDARS=18 at the beginning of the year, to USDARS=39.
What is happening? As people expect the peso to lose value, they sell it on the foreign exchange market and buy US dollars. This makes the peso lose value (become cheaper, depreciate). To prevent this, the Argentine central bank raised interest rates, making holding peso more attractive. It did not work, with the slide in peso continuing.Now imagine that you are running a business in Argentina. Borrowing in local currency is prohibitively expensive. Borrowing in dollars is risky: the local currency value of dollar loans has more than doubled in the last 8 months.
You can find the details of the article here:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/30/argentina-raises-interest-rates-to-60-to-shore-up-pesoYou can check the current exchange rate here:
https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=ARS&To=USD
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