As our dinner ended at a chic Peruvian restaurant in Buenos Aires last month, my Irish uncles and cousins, in town for a family wedding, pulled out their phones. Shaking their heads in amazement, they photographed the mountain of Argentine pesos they had assembled to pay the $90 bill. I cringed.

I understood the impulse: for tourists paying in cash, any large sum in Argentina requires a comically large wad of 1,000 peso notes, each worth about $1 — the result of the Argentine currency losing 98 per cent of its value against the dollar since 2017, when the 1,000 peso note was first released. I’ve seen many foreigners do the same since I moved here in June.

But I was still embarrassed, not wanting to be seen laughing at this symptom of Argentina’s economic distress. The South American country is suffering its worst crisis in two decades, with annual inflation above 140 per cent and two-fifths of Argentines living in poverty. That’s the backdrop that propelled Javier Milei, an eccentric libertarian economist, to victory at recent presidential elections. He has pledged swingeing spending cuts and deregulation to reboot the economy.