Argentina ditches central bank head on eve of bond exchange

This year, for the first time, Euromoney has presented its award for central bank governor of the year to someone who isn't a central bank governor (see Euromoney September 2004). At the end of September, two weeks before the IMF/World Bank meetings, the mandate of Argentina's Alfonso Prat-Gay expired and president Néstor Kirchner did not renew it. By Argentine standards, Prat-Gay had a good term. As he said, when receiving his award from Padraic Fallon, chairman of Euromoney Institutional Investor: "When we took office in December 2002 we had a lot of ambitions, the main one being to make it to the end of the term – this being a country whose central bank is only 68 years old and has had 48 governors along the way."