Foreign Exchange Market, Debt and External Asset Formation Report 2015 – 2019

The Presidency of the Nation requested this Central Bank to prepare a detailed report on what happened in terms of regulation, access and operation of the foreign exchange market in the period between December 2015 and December 2019.

Given its statistical resources, the BCRA is in a privileged position to expose and analyze some of the economic and financial processes that led to the crisis that is affecting the country today.

The first section of this paper provides a brief review of the specialized literature that accounts for the history and dynamics of external debt crises in Latin America. In the second section, the mechanisms on which the process of indebtedness and capital flight that triggered the current debt crisis were built are presented. Finally, in the third section, the main conclusions of the statistical analysis on the operations carried out in the foreign exchange market in the period under study are reflected.