Via AP:

Argentina’s economy is under pressure from rising inflation and slowing trade, and people have been increasingly trading their pesos for U.S. dollars to shelter their earnings.
Currency controls aimed at reducing rampant tax evasion have fueled anxiety about the economy, accelerating capital flight and discouraging investment. After years of booming growth, businesses of all kinds are slowing down.
Kicillof [deputy economy minister] insisted Argentina is well-positioned to confront these challenges, with nearly $47 billion in central bank reserves, more than enough to meet a $2.3 billion bond payment due in August.
He raised the issue as he accused opposition news media of trying to instill panic in a population that remembers losing two-thirds of its wealth a decade ago when the government tried to avert economic collapse by limiting what people could withdraw from their savings, and then devalued the currency.
Wealthy Argentines with overseas accounts were able to get their money out of the country ahead of that devaluation, but many others lost their life savings overnight.

I suspect that’s a precedent of which many Greeks are aware. If not, they ought to be.

Since then, many Argentines have tried to keep their money outside banks and beyond the reach of tax agents, dumping pesos for dollars whenever they can.
“This is not 2001,” Kicillof said, waving a copy of a newspaper that alleged Friday that he was lobbying President Cristina Fernandez to “de-dollarize” the economy.
The supposed plan described by El Cronista Comercial would summarily change dollar-denominated contracts into pesos at official exchange rates after the August bond payment, trapping the wealth of the middle and upper classes inside Argentina.
[Kiciloff] blamed increasingly ominous news reports for encouraging Argentines to withdraw their savings in pesos and turn to the black market, where the demand for dollars has driven down the value of pesos 30 percent in recent weeks. A hundred pesos, Argentina’s largest denomination, has slipped to $17 in illegal trading, while the official exchange rate would bring $22.

The moment you read that there is a black market rate for a currency, you know that the ‘official’ rate is rigged, and so it is:

The president decreed in October that anyone buying foreign currency must first get authorization from Argentina’s tax agency. The agency examines what the buyer has paid in wealth and income taxes, then subtracts documented living expenses from declared wealth to determine how many legally obtained pesos an individual might have available to sell.

Given the way that the US government has been operating recently with regard to the increasingly oppressive regime governing foreign bank accounts/investments and, if Barbara Boxer gets her way (with support, it seems, from “many” GOP senators, naturally) foreign travel, and if Chuck Schumer gets his way, proposed new expatriation rules (which contain a hint-at least in the way they are justified-of the old East German attack on Republikflucht), American readers should not feel too smug about this story.

But back to Argentina:

The controls now have their first legal challenge, filed by Julio Cesar Duran, a retiree in the provincial capital of La Plata whose request to sell $10 worth of pesos for dollars to give to his grandchildren was denied. The online authorization system declared his purchase “inconsistent,” without further explanation.
Theoretically, anyone who has paid his taxes and properly declared his income and wealth should be able to freely trade pesos for dollars at the official rate. But Duran is among a growing number of Argentines complaining that they’ve been cut off even though their taxes are up to date.

There’s a shock.