The president needs the U.S. dollars long stowed in teddy bears and safe-deposit boxes for his free-market overhaul
Argentines have hoarded dollars over the decades because of a lack of trust in banks.
BUENOS AIRES—Argentina’s libertarian leader Javier Milei has won over President Trump and wooed global investors. Now he must convince crisis-weary Argentines to stop hoarding their U.S. dollars.
From greenbacks stuffed into children’s teddy bears to fortunes tucked away in the ceiling, Argentines have more than $250 billion in dollars stashed at home, along with offshore accounts and safe-deposit boxes—some six times the reserves of the central bank.
But two years into Milei’s government, Argentines are easing their grip on their precious dollars.
Dollars held in the country’s banks by private-sector investors hit a record at the end of last year of nearly $37 billion, up 160% since Milei took office in December 2023, according to central-bank data.
Along the leafy boulevards of Buenos Aires, optimism is rising as the government softens financial controls, encouraging Argentines to plow previously undeclared cash into everything from cars to real estate.
“Customers are getting bolder, there is less need to hide things,” said Fabian Luciani, a car salesman in the city for the past 25 years. More than half of his clients pay in cash, he said, sometimes with dollars that families say have been buried in their backyards for years.
The color of the notes is usually a dead giveaway.
“They’ve got yellowish, brownish stains—you know, from humidity,” Luciani said, musing about how many dollars now sitting in the U.S. Treasury bear the stains of Argentine soil.
Keeping dollars “under the mattress”—outside the formal economy—has long been a national ritual after wild swings in the peso, bank freezes and other capital controls destroyed Argentines’ trust in the banks over the course of decades.
But as any Argentine will tell you, you would have to be stupid to literally hide cash under your mattress—it’s the first place a burglar would look.
“I hid it in a chair, inside the metal tube of the chair leg,” said Héctor Orsenigo, who like many here takes pride in his ingenuity. “Everyone has their own little hiding place.”
He started hoarding dollars soon after Argentina’s 2001 financial collapse, when the government froze bank deposits and blocked cash withdrawals. The measure wiped out families’ life savings, sparking mass protests. Orsenigo said the stress even killed a friend, who suffered a fatal heart attack.
Others describe money hidden in ceilings, toilet tanks and even household appliances, part of a folklore of concealment born of repeated financial trauma.
Getting these “mattress dollars” back in the banks, even temporarily, would be a major boon for Milei and his efforts to radically overhaul South America’s second-biggest economy after Brazil. With more dollars available, lenders could expand loans and export credit, boosting growth and easing some of the pain from the government’s austerity measures
“Deposit your dollars in the bank…as in any other part of the world!” Argentina’s economy minister, Luis Caputo, recently urged the nation’s savers.
Unearthing cash has in the past been risky, opening families to prosecution for the tax they didn’t pay. Some would rather risk losing it, said Juan Truffa, director of consulting firm Outlier.
While working at a bank earlier in his career, Truffa said a flood nearly destroyed the contents of his basement’s safe-deposit boxes, forcing staff to use hair dryers to dry millions of dollars in cash—money whose owners still refused to declare or deposit it into accounts.
But Milei is taking on the taxman. Congress passed a law in December to raise the thresholds for tax evasion, allowing Argentines to use as much as $70,000 in some cases without declaring the origin of the cash. Previously, they risked prosecution for using more than $1,000.
While it will take months to put the law into practice, a similar tax amnesty under Milei in 2024 coaxed about $24 billion back into the financial system and led Argentines to declare roughly 55,000 properties, official figures show.
One of those was a house in Uruguay that belonged to a client of Gerardo Keselman, an architect and real-estate developer in Buenos Aires. The amnesty allowed the owners to sell the house and bring the cash to Argentina to invest in one of Keselman’s new apartment complexes, he said.
Keselman expects the government’s latest law to lure even more cash into the real-estate market, adding that it is easier to persuade jittery savers to invest in something they can see and touch. “They’d rather put it in bricks than a bank,” he said.
The opening up of Argentina’s nascent mortgage market is also expected to boost sales.
Argentina has announced dozens of tax amnesties over the years, only for the rules to be reversed by subsequent governments, which sometimes chase down Argentines for the assets and cash they just declared.
But Milei’s latest law promises to bring more extensive changes, said Truffa, citing rules that shift the burden onto tax authorities to prove wrongdoing rather than requiring savers to prove their innocence. “People are starting to say, ‘Hey, maybe this time really is different.’”
Others are less optimistic. Argentines are too traumatized to change their saving habits soon, said Gustavo Lazzari, an economist and owner of a small meat processor.
“That memory is passed down, from parents and grandparents.”
Like many younger Argentines, Milagros Gavilán, 19, who works at a bar in downtown Buenos Aires, said she rarely has any cash to save.
“But when I do have money, I keep it between my clothes in the wardrobe,” she said, repeating the habits she learned from her grandmother, who also used to stuff bills in her Bible.
Many remember the exhilarating moment when they stumbled upon their parent’s secret hiding place as a child.
“One day we lifted the cover of the window blind and saw a bag stuck there,” said Patricia Fernández, a public-sector employee. “My dad said, ‘No! Don’t touch that! That’s mine!’”
Others are still discovering dollars in family heirlooms left by long-deceased relatives.
In downtown Buenos Aires, the steel-enforced vault of Ingot, a company that rents out thousands of safe-deposit boxes, serves as a bellwether for confidence in the government.
Business had boomed over the past decade amid widespread distrust in the banks, said Juan Piantoni, the company’s chief executive.
Now, Ingot predicts as much as a 15% decline in business this year. The company is doing its best to persuade Argentines to store other items in its boxes.
“Maybe someone has a former girlfriend and keeps letters or photos,” Piantoni said. “It’s just not appropriate for it to be in the house.”
