Barter Binge.(Brief Article)

Things are slow at the Ateneo barter club on the impoverished fringes of Buenos Aires. About 50 people listlessly swap cleaning products for bags of flour or pots of homemade jam. Carmen Barrientos, a part-time nurse at the local hospital, offers medical services in exchange for the sparse goods available. She finds few takers, although her son, Diego, 9, manages to trade three soft-drink bottles full of detergent for a pencil case, a bag of cocoa and some paintbrushes. "These days you can't get by on your wages," she complains.

The gloom is a stark contrast to the mood just a few months ago. Gaby Gandarillas, one of the club's coordinators, remembers when as many as 300 people would fill the small hall and you could swap for anything from food to haircuts, computer maintenance or legal services. "I organized my daughter's entire 15th birthday party by barter," she says. At its peak, the nationwide network of barter clubs involved as many as 6 million people--one Argentine in seven. But recently the system has fallen victim to its own success, overwhelmed by the army of new poor created by the country's devastating four-year depression. Offering little apart from secondhand clothes and electrical goods, the new arrivals dumped their unwanted possessions, cleared out the available food (the one product everyone wanted to trade for), and left. Meanwhile, the network's growth attracted counterfeiters who reproduced the printed credits that had become a de facto currency within the network. With more fakes than real credits in circulation, hyperinflation set in. A few months ago a leather jacket at La Estacion, one of the largest barter clubs in Buenos Aires, would fetch around 150 credits, according to Susana Garcia, who offers orthopedic footwear there. Now the price is 3,000 credits. "I feel cheated," she says. "I won't be coming back."

This decline mirrors the story of Argentina as a whole. For a time, barter offered an alternative to the country's hopelessly dysfunctional real economy, which seems to get worse by the day. Nearly a quarter of the population is now officially unemployed. One in five Argentines suffers what economist Artemio Lopez calls extreme poverty, meaning they go hungry without food handouts. Amid the collapse, barter seemed one way to make ends meet. Now even that is falling, prey to the same forces that broke the traditional economy--corruption and inflation. Small wonder that some of the jobless dream of winning a spot on "Recursos Humanos," a local TV show where viewers vote by phone to decide which of two desperate contestants is given a job.

For a country that was once the richest on the continent and believed that its European flavor set it apart from poorer neighbors, such misery has provoked much soul-searching. According to pollster Ricardo Rouvier, almost half the population describes its principal reaction to the crisis as anxiety, sadness or bitterness, compared with less than a third who feel angry. Scattered protests have been organized by impoverished street people, as well as wealthier bank depositors demanding the return of their frozen savings. But the movements have little in common and offer few proposals beyond the removal of the ...