84th Anniversary of the BCRA: From a Historical Point of View

May 31, 2019. The BCRA was founded on May 31, 1935, in the aftermath of the 1929 world crisis. Using this landmark as their starting point, economic historians Pablo Gerchunoff, Juan Luis Martirén, and Pablo Schiaffino talk about the inception of the monetary authority in a video on occasion of its 84th anniversary.

The video shows historical documents that have never been released before, such as the original text of the institution’s Minutes Book No.1. The initial measures of the BCRA, which were recorded on the Minutes of the then new monetary authority, can now be seen for the first time ever.

“The Central Bank was founded amidst a quite complicated context,” Martirén, researcher of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Conicet) and of the Instituto Ravignani of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), explains; he then adds: “The 1929 crisis hit the main international economies and Argentina was no exception.”. “This was the case since the creation of the institution, with Ernesto Bosch, as governor, and Raúl Prebisch, a prominent exponent in the General Management Office,” highlighted Gerchunoff, emeritus professor at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT) and honorary professor at the UBA. “Prebisch was one of the most prestigious Argentinian economists,”, underscored Schiaffino, professor at the UTDT, who also acknowledged that the Raúl Prebisch had a strategic view on Argentina’s integration in the world of those times.