The current administration (as many others before, mostly of the same party, Justicialism, but also of the other main party, UCR, and de-facto governments) does

The current administration (as many others before, mostly of the same party, Justicialism, but also of the other main party, UCR, and de-facto governments) doesn't allow for a floating exchange rate [0]. Nowadays, the ARS follows a (very slow) crawling peg devaluation against the USD, buuuut if you want to buy dollars (or want to pay some product or service abroad, think Aliexpress but also App Store, Netflix, AWS, etc.) you have to pay a tax, and can't buy more than 200 per month per person. Then you have dollars that you can acquire via a broker, buying and selling bonds or shares; these are more expensive than the official+tax rate. And then yoy have the black-market, which tends to be the highest priced. Argentina also has a chronic problem with inflation (in my opinion, due to printing more money than required by the economy, most times to solve the fiscal deficit you obtain when the national state spends too much), so everyone knows that you have to save money in a hard currency, USD being the most common one. So it has a real big demand for savings and capitalization, e.g. real estate is priced in dollars. As why argentinians keep voting parties that keep the dollar artificially cheap, I believe it's a mix between a survivorship behaviour (if USD goes up, prices of goods and services will more or less go up) and wanting to consume more than what one can afford (holidays in Brazil, trips to Europe or USA every other year, cheap electricity and natural gas so you can leave your air conditioner on all day, etc). Disclaimer: I am not an economist, and as everyone else, I have a biased point of view. [0] This newspaper article has a (badly cropped) chart of the difference between black-market and official dollar exchange rate through the years. https://www.infobae.com/economia/2020/08/22/la-historia-de-los-controles-de-cambio-como-se-comporto-la-brecha-entre-el-dolar-libre-y-el-oficial/ https://www.infobae.com/economia/2020/08/22/la-historia-de-l...