By Juan Curutchet, Superintendent of Financial and Foreign Exchange Institutions and BCRA director.
For decades, Argentines grew accustomed to living with an anomaly that, through repetition, ended up seeming normal: an economy virtually without credit. Buying a home or financing an investment became a privilege reserved, to a large extent, for those who already had capital or for those who had access to low-rate credit lines that the State frequently imposed on the banking system. For most Argentines, a much more primitive rule prevailed: save first and buy later. In an inflationary economy and with a currency that systematically lost its value, that “later” might never come.
The system also penalized those who did what a healthy economy should reward: saving. For long periods, the rates paid by banks remained well below inflation. The rational response was to take savings out of the financial system, seek refuge in the dollar or in bricks and mortar, or consume before money lost value.
On the other side, an equally pernicious distortion took hold: a credit culture based on the expectation of its erosion. Taking on debt could be a great deal if one obtained a subsidized or artificially low rate and then inflation reduced the real value of the installments. Instead of building a culture of saving and credit, we built one of flight from the peso and another of seeking the erosion of debts.
A sound credit system requires exactly the opposite: that saving be reasonable, that depositors receive adequate remuneration, that borrowers assume they will repay what they received, and that the bank earn by properly intermediating between the two. It seems elementary, but in Argentina, for far too long, it was not.
For that reason, one of the most important changes the Argentine economy is undergoing deserves more praise than it receives: credit to the private sector is growing again. In July, bank credit in pesos reached 9.2% of GDP and, adding foreign-currency loans, it reached 12.5%.
We remain, however, behind. According to the broad and homogeneous definition used by the World Bank, in 2024 credit to the private sector measured as a share of GDP was equivalent to 40% in Peru, 76% in Brazil, and 104% in Chile. In the United States it exceeded 200%.
In mortgage lending, the gap is even more striking. The stock of these loans barely exceeds 1% of Argentina’s GDP, versus around 27% in Chile and 50% in the United States. A neighboring country thus has a mortgage market, relative to its economy, more than twenty times larger than ours.
How did we get here? The answer lies mainly in the chronic fiscal deficit. For many years, and very especially under the Kirchnerist model, the State operated as a gigantic vacuum cleaner of available resources. The deficit had to be financed through monetary issuance, Treasury borrowing, or, directly or indirectly, resources from the Central Bank and the financial system.
For banks, lending to the State at high rates and with low capital consumption was, most of the time, more attractive than assuming the risk of financing an SME, a family, or a long-term investment. A phenomenon known as crowding out then occurred: the public sector displaced the private sector from the credit market. Argentines’ scarce saving ended up financing the State instead of homes, machines, shops, and businesses.
The balancing of public accounts initiated during Javier Milei’s presidency profoundly changes that equation. A State that does not systematically spend more than it collects also stops competing for every available peso. Saving grows and can once again flow to the private sector. Put simply: banks can go back to being banks.
It is probably in mortgage credit that this process will have its most visible social manifestation. During 2017 and early 2018, under Mauricio Macri’s government, UVA loans produced a genuine mortgage boom. Tens of thousands of families were able to buy their homes. The subsequent macroeconomic crisis interrupted that process and made things difficult for borrowers with the inflationary surge.
From 2024 onward, credit reappeared. Since then and through the first half of 2026, nearly 65,000 families obtained a mortgage loan.
In that context, the recent Sustainability Guarantee Fund program takes on particular importance: as of today, it will place resources through auctions of UVA time deposits in banks to finance first-home mortgage loans. The mechanism addresses a structural problem: it is difficult to lend for twenty or thirty years when a large share of deposits can be withdrawn over much shorter horizons.
According to published estimates, those resources could translate into 20,000 new mortgages. Behind each loan are Argentines who dream: 20,000 more families who will transform future income into present wealth. And this is only the beginning.
There is a deeper idea behind all of this: building a society of homeowners. Homeownership is, in much of the world, the main form of wealth accumulation for the middle class. A family that pays a mortgage for twenty years does not only solve where to live: it accumulates capital and ends up owning an asset it can keep, sell, rent out, or pass on to its children.
The reasoning extends to the entire economy. The shopkeeper who expands a storefront, the professional who finances equipment, the producer who buys a machine, or the company that builds a plant use credit to bring forward investments that will generate future income.
Here one of the engines of growth appears: saving turns into credit; credit, into investment; investment increases capital and productivity, and higher productivity allows real wages to grow sustainably. A virtuous circle is generated: stability fosters saving, saving enables more credit, credit generates investment, and investment increases income.
Of course, credit expansion brings challenges. After so many years of disintermediation, banks, companies, and families will have to relearn risk management. There will be delinquency and mistakes in lending and borrowing. It will be necessary to improve credit assessment and avoid over-indebtedness. Credit growth requires prudence, professionalism, and sound regulation.
But it would be a mistake to conclude that credit is the problem. Prosperous societies are not those where nobody takes on debt, but those where a family with predictable income can finance a home over twenty years and a company with a good project does not need to accumulate all the capital in advance to carry it out.
To move forward, there is one condition that precedes all the others: preserving macroeconomic stability, a pillar of Javier Milei’s economic program and that of his minister, Luis Caputo. There is no long-term credit in an economy that periodically destroys its currency, nor deep saving when savers must constantly think about how to defend themselves against inflation, a devaluation, or an arbitrary change in the rules.
For that reason, fiscal balance has consequences that go far beyond statistics. The State ceasing to be a vacuum cleaner of credit means those resources can finance a home, a machine, a shop, or a factory. Stability is not an accounting end: it is the infrastructure on which the long term is built.
Argentina is only beginning that path and credit levels remain extraordinarily low. But the wheel has started to turn. If we preserve stability, each turn can give speed to the next: more saving, more credit, more investment, more capital, higher productivity, and better real wages.
In a few years, we may confirm that one of the most important changes of this cycle was not defeating inflation or balancing public accounts, but that thousands of Argentines once again walked into a bank, applied for a twenty-year loan, and could imagine that, by working and paying their installments, one day that house would be theirs.
It is much more than restoring credit. It is a society that once again has a future.
