I didn't make it to the end of the essay, but near the beginning I saw this which looked like it couldn't possibly be right:

> In 1824, only eight years after the declaration of independence from the Spanish empire, the union of provinces that would eventually become the Argentine Republic obtained a loan of £1 million pounds (a whopping £110 billion today, according to the Bank of England) from Barings Bank, a British private bank that also had lent money to the US government...It was only in 1904 that Argentina’s original debt was formally repaid. It had taken 80 years, more than three generations, and had cost about eight times the original value.

According to for example this calculator (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...) 1 million pounds in 1824 is about 83 million pounds today, so it's off by a factor of 1000.

This distinction is obviously important to the narrative of "Argentina has been crippled by foreign debt" so I lost a lot of trust that the rest of the article was going to be accurate.