50 Centavos

Banco Mauá y Ca. was the Argentine arm of Irineu Evangelista de Sousa's financial network — the Barão de Mauá, the Brazilian entrepreneur who built one of the most ambitious private banking operations in nineteenth-century South America. The Rosario branch issued its own notes independently of the Buenos Aires operation, a distinction that matters for collectors since the two series are catalogued separately and are not interchangeable.

The PS prefix places this firmly in the Specialized catalog as a private bank issue from a period when provincial Argentina had no unified currency — local banco notes circulated by trust, not by legal mandate. Mauá's network collapsed in 1875 after a combination of the global financial crisis and overextension across Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina.