Juan Cuattromo, president of Banco Provincia, came out to say out loud what many in the Buenos Aires financial system prefer not to mention: the levels of default that the entity is registering have not been seen since the 2001 crisis. The diagnosis points directly to the national economic model and does not offer prospects for improvement in the short term.
There are numbers that do not need much interpretation. When the president of one of the most important public banks in the country says that the levels of delinquency he is seeing only have a precedent in the 2001 crisis, the data is only worth contextualizing well. Juan Cuattromo said it this week in an interview with FM Provincia, and the impact of the phrase is not minor: we are not facing a technical warning from a cautious official. It is a political diagnosis with a first and last name.
According to Cuattromo, the default recorded by Banco Provincia has a structural character, not a temporary one. The hardest hit sectors are industry, commerce and construction, precisely where the macroeconomic adjustment is most strongly concentrated. The province of Buenos Aires, by concentrating a good part of the country’s productive activity, absorbs this impact disproportionately. It is not a problem of local administration or bank management: it is the direct reflection, according to the official, of a national economic policy design that turns its back on the internal market.
The problem, furthermore, does not respect geographies. Cuattromo clarified that even in the provinces that could be considered «winners» of the current model there are records of increasing defaults linked to job loss. The extension of the phenomenon complicates any reading that attempts to limit it to the specific deterioration of the Buenos Aires suburbs or the productive fabric of Buenos Aires.
What is the mechanism that explains the jump? The official was quite precise: when credit stops being a tool for investment or consumption and becomes a resource to pay basic bills or replace income that no longer arrives, the payment chain begins to break. Credit as a patch, not as a driving force, ends in default. And that is the scenario that Banco Provincia says it is seeing every day.
The entity’s institutional response began at the end of last year, with refinancing programs aimed at those who earn less than four minimum wages, with a reduction of 50 points in the rate. According to the bank’s own data, this scheme allowed six times more refinancings to be carried out than in the same period of the previous year. Cuattromo announced that there will be additional news in the coming days. The bank works on the symptom because, it recognized, it cannot act on the cause.
And there appears the political dimension of the matter. Cuattromo does not speak on behalf of Axel Kicillof’s government by chance: his reading of the problem places responsibility at the national level and constructs a story in which the province is the victim of a model that it did not design. This narrative has a clear electoral target for 2027, when Buenos Aires Kirchnerism will need arguments to contest an election in an economic context that, if the bank’s own forecast comes true, does not improve.
The question that Cuattromo’s warning leaves open is perhaps the most uncomfortable: if default levels are already at 2001, what happens if economic policy does not change course before the end of the year? Does Banco Provincia have enough tools to contain this with refinancing alone? The comparison with 2001 is not a campaign argument.
