What happens when a Western economy dies
If you want to know what happens when a 21st century economy crashes, ask an Argentinean.
When their currency, the peso, which had been artificially pegged to the dollar, had to be devalued in 2002, savers lost 70 per cent of the money they had kept in their bank accounts. With the government forced to default on payment of its huge, unmanageable debt and unable to bail out the banks, Argentina went through four presidents in a fortnight.
Before this disaster struck, in the prosperous 1990s, you couldn't walk anywhere in Miami without bumping into well-to-do Argentines, preppy pastel sweaters draped over their shoulders, spending their easily earned dollars in the city's swishest malls. But after the crash, proud, well-dressed people who had nostalgically considered
The 2001 collapse of the Argentine peso set off an economic catastrophe, says Harry Underwood
themselves members of the first world - Argentina was once one of the world's ten wealthiest nations - were reduced to queuing for soup.
With almost a quarter of the population forced out of work, some skilled factory workers formed co-operatives and commandeered the businesses that had been abandoned by their bosses when the economy bombed. For others, the only way to scrape together £10 a week was to sell cardboard to recycling plants for under 10p a kilo. So every night, the cartoneros, a new 40,000-strong underclass, came in from the suburbs with trolleys and scoured the streets of Buenos Aires. All this in a city once called the Paris of the South.
Crime - and sales of self-defence courses and burglar alarms - soared. Copper from phone lines, aluminium from traffic lights and even the bronze plaque on a 
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