Argentina’s Senate approved a rewrite of the central bank’s founding law by 46 votes to 22 on Thursday, 24 September 2026, and the result hands the Banco Central de la República Argentina a narrower job and tighter political control over who gets to run it. If the reform becomes law, the bank will have one goal: preserving the peso’s value. It will also be barred from lending to the national government, the provinces and the municipalities.
That’s the shape of the new order. Less room for public credit, more discipline for everyone who earns, saves or pays rent in pesos. The bill strips out the current charter’s broader goals, including financial stability, jobs and economic development with social equity, and leaves the bank with a single mission: protecting the peso. It also removes the bank’s power to steer credit toward chosen sectors, ending another lever governments used to direct money where they wanted it to go.
Who Gets to Decide
The Senate vote sent the reform back to the Chamber of Deputies, because the lower house had already passed the bill on 26 August by 144 votes to 102, with 9 abstentions. Senators changed the rules for the bank’s leadership, so the bill now returns to the lower house. Removal of the bank’s president or directors will be decreed by the president with prior approval of an absolute majority of the Senate, 37 of 72 votes. Appointments will also need those 37 Senate votes. Terms stay at six years and can be renewed.
The bill also ends the president’s power to remove bank officials on his own and drops the Economy Ministry’s seat at board meetings. That’s not decentralisation in any meaningful sense. It’s a rearrangement of the same apparatus, with the state still deciding who sits where and who gets to speak for the money machine.
Senator Agustín Monteverde of Milei’s La Libertad Avanza said the blocs had agreed to revise the rules for the bank’s leadership. The rewritten article passed 66 to 2, with Peronist votes. In the same session, the Senate turned into law changes to the Zona Fría scheme, which subsidises gas bills in colder regions.
What the Bank Can No Longer Do
The reform ends the two tools past governments used to draw money from the bank: adelantos transitorios, short-term cash advances, and letras intransferibles, non-tradable IOUs the Treasury gives the bank for its reserves. The bank may no longer buy government bonds when they are first issued, though it can still trade them on the open market at market prices for monetary goals. Profits from a weaker peso or a higher gold price can no longer be sent to the Treasury as dividends; those paper gains must stay in the bank’s capital.
The bill’s explanatory note says governments since the end of the dollar peg in 2002 used that practice, including Javier Milei’s government. International reserves are declared immune from seizure by creditors. While old Treasury debts to the bank remain unpaid, part of its yearly profit must go toward settling them.
Milei presented the reform in a national television address on 30 July and has made ending money printing the core of his plan against inflation. He celebrated on social media, writing, “The end of inflation begins,” while sharing a post by Senator Patricia Bullrich. Bullrich said the law has a technical name but is really about protecting the value of the currency. Opposition senators said a single goal would neglect credit and growth, and objected to using reserves as collateral.
The IMF Bill Comes Due
On the same day, Argentina made its first principal repayment under the IMF program, paying about US$793 million on Friday, 25 September 2026. The payment was 583.3 million special drawing rights, or SDRs, and the IMF’s rate for 25 September valued one SDR at US$1.36008, putting the payment at about US$793.4 million. Argentine outlets using earlier rates put it at between US$797 million and US$803 million. At the central bank’s official rate of 1,518.74 pesos per dollar on 24 September, it equaled 1.2 trillion pesos, about US$793 million.
The IMF lists the payment as a “GRA repurchase (EFF)”. It repays principal on an Extended Fund Facility, the Fund’s longer-term loan. Such loans are repaid in twelve half-yearly slices, starting four and a half years after each drawing. Argentina drew SDR 7 billion, about US$9.5 billion at today’s rate, in March 2022; one twelfth of that is SDR 583.3 million, about US$793 million. Interest and fees are billed separately, four times a year. IMF records show Argentina paid SDR 1.71 billion, about US$2.3 billion, of them from January to August, but no principal.
Argentina owes the IMF about SDR 42.6 billion, roughly US$58 billion, at the end of August 2026, making it the Fund’s largest debtor. The debt goes back to 2018, when President Mauricio Macri’s government took the largest loan in IMF history. That stand-by loan was approved at SDR 40.7 billion, then about US$57 billion. Argentina drew SDR 31.9 billion, about US$43 billion at today’s rate, before the programme ended in 2020. In 2022, under President Alberto Fernández, a new extended loan of SDR 31.9 billion refinanced it. In April 2025, President Javier Milei’s government agreed a third arrangement, of SDR 15.3 billion, presented as US$20 billion. About SDR 11.5 billion, about US$15.6 billion, of it has been paid out.
The Treasury is funding the IMF repayment from its dollar deposits at the central bank, about US$2.23 billion on 22 September. It uses those dollars to buy SDRs, then hands them to the Fund. That route lowers gross reserves by roughly the size of the payment, but leaves net reserves unchanged, according to analysts cited in the source material. Gross reserves closed at US$48.845 billion on Thursday, 24 September, their lowest level this month. They had fallen US$481 million on Wednesday, partly on a US$100 million payment to CAF, a Latin American development bank.
An IMF staff team arrived on Monday, 21 September, for the third review of the 2025 programme. It is led by Joyce Wong, on her first review as mission chief for Argentina. The team is checking budget and reserve targets with the economy ministry and the central bank. Economy Minister Luis Caputo was in New York with Milei for the United Nations General Assembly. If staff agree, and the IMF Executive Board then approves, Argentina can draw SDR 636 million, about US$865 million. The government plans to use it to refill the Treasury deposits spent on Friday. No staff-level agreement had been announced by Friday. Finance Secretary Federico Furiase said on Monday that the targets were “super cumplidas”, or more than met.
The next IMF bill arrives in early November: SDR 636 million, about US$865 million, of interest and charges. On 24 December, a second principal slice of SDR 250 million, about US$340 million, is due. Then, on 9 January, Argentina owes bondholders about US$4.3 billion on its Globales and Bonares, the bonds from its 2020 restructuring. The IMF’s own projections put Argentina’s payments at about US$7.7 billion in 2027 and US$9.6 billion in 2028, at today’s SDR rate.
The payment was scheduled years ago, and the dollars were set aside. It is not a sign of trouble. Nor does it shrink Argentina’s exposure much, since roughly US$57 billion remains. And it is not new borrowing: buying SDRs to pay the Fund creates no debt.