Two documents from the US State Department’s archives show how import controls presented opportunities for extraordinary profits during the first Peronist governments.
Following the Second World War, there was a worldwide dollar shortage due to the United States’ high level of self-sufficiency as an agro-industrial behemoth. Governments therefore imposed quantitative controls on imports, in order to ration the available supply of dollars. A study made in 1955 by John Hopkins, an enterprising member of the US Embassy in Buenos Aires, demonstrates how these controls presented fantastic opportunities for arbitrage profits for those who could obtain them.