Los medios de pago en el largo plazo. El caso de Buenos Aires, del dinero virreinal al dinero bancario

The article seeks to show that every means of payment admitted as money entails both the materialization of a commitment assumed by its issuer and potential benefits resulting from the provision of admissible transactional instruments. Consequently, the material and institutional changes experienced in the long term by the means of payment have implied modifications in the ways of formulating those commitments and in the way of negotiating the distribution of the reported benefits. The case of the Río de la Plata, an economy lacking in local metalliferous production, offers an observatory to understand how different governments materialized their commitments in means of payment and distributed the benefits resulting from their provision, demonstrating the changes experienced between the Hispanic and post-revolutionary periods to focus, then, on the change that opened the door to a period whose matrix has been sustained ever since: the irruption of the banking system and its payment instruments.