ABSTRACT
In the middle of the political chaos, after Congress appointed Eduardo Duhalde as the new president with the support of the Radicals, Duhalde decided to abandon convertibility and to transform all dollar-denominated financial obligations, including bank deposits, into obligations in inconvertible pesos. The destruction of convertibility through the combination of devaluation, generalized reprogramming of deposits in the financial system, peso-ification of contracts, and default of the internal but already restructured debt, and later, floating of the peso, implied the demolition of the contractual base of the economy and a violation of property rights. Simultaneously, the fall of domestic demand had been so large that the outcome was a deepening of the recession never seen before in Argentina. Other national leaders lobbied for a 'change of rules' referring to the economic reforms implemented in Argentina throughout the 1990s as 'the neo-liberal model'.
