500 000 Australes - Provisional Issue

Argentina's hyperinflationary crisis of 1989–1990 forced the Banco Central into a series of increasingly desperate stopgap measures. This provisional issue was created by overprinting existing stock — the 500,000 australes denomination was not printed fresh but stamped onto previously issued notes, a method that compressed production time when the presses could not keep pace with collapsing purchasing power.

The austral itself had been introduced in 1985 as a replacement for the peso, part of the Austral Plan that briefly stabilized the economy. By 1990 it was in freefall. This note's existence is essentially a record of that failure.