10 Pesos

The Casa de Moneda de Buenos Aires was not simply a mint that dabbled in paper — by the 1840s it had become the de facto central bank of the Argentine Confederation, issuing notes that circulated far beyond Buenos Aires province despite having no federal mandate to do so. The Junta de la Administración overseeing it operated under constant fiscal pressure from the Rosas government, which used note issuance as a primary tool for financing military and political operations. Inflation was chronic and the peso paper had been depreciating against hard coin for years before this note was struck.

Notes of this series are found today almost exclusively with heavy folds and handling wear — they circulated hard in a period of monetary instability that left few reasons to save them.